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Net Promoter Score (NPS) Customer Retention
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5 Ways to Leverage Net Promoter Score to Boost Customer Retention

By: The InMoment Team

You don’t just want to appeal to new customers—you also want to keep your current ones coming back again and again. Not only do returning customers require less introduction to your products and services, but they also tend to spend more than first-time customers, too. 

One user engagement strategy you can use to boost your customer retention is to make use of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system. Simple to understand, this powerful metric can give you a wealth of information that you can use to improve your brand. 

What Is Net Promoter Score?

NPS is a metric designed to measure customer experience. First, you ask your customers a simple question:

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend my brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

Then, customers are asked to explain in their own words why they chose the score they did.

From this, you can place your customers on a scale, where anyone who answered between 0-6 is a detractor, 7-8 is passive, and 9-10 are promoters. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) calculation

In order to get your Net Promoter Score, you take the detractors away from the promoters.

Let’s say you’ve surveyed 100 people. Of these 100 people, 30 are detractors, 40 are promoters, and 30 are passive. That leaves you with:

40 – 30 = 10

Promoters – Detractors = NPS

Determining your NPS is important, of course, but analyzing the open-ended responses to the follow-up question is what will help you understand the “why” behind your score and make NPS feedback actionable.

What Do These Categories Mean?

Promoters

This category (people who selected 9 and 10) are your loyal fans. They’re likely to be repeat customers, often spending more on subsequent purchases. They generally have a positive view of your brand (meaning if they do contact you with a complaints, they’re often more forgiving). 

As well as this, they tend to refer new customers to you – accounting for more than 80% of referrals for many businesses – and talk about you on social media/in person. You may see effusive praise, with descriptions like ‘we’ve been able to achieve our goals’ or ‘this is the only software I’ll use’, along with thoughtful suggestions for improvement.

Passives

This group (people who chose 7 or 8) tends to be satisfied, but not in the same way as promoters. They’re happy with their purchase, and they might buy from you again, though not nearly as reliably. 

They are unlikely to complain about you to colleagues, but won’t necessarily spend their time singing your praises or talking about you on social media either. They’re also likely to evaluate competitors if they see an interesting advertisement or offer, rather than being wholly loyal to your brand.

Detractors

You might think that a 6 is a high score to count as a detractor, but generally, this group are unhappy customers. Encompassing everyone who chose between 0 and 6, they’re likely to talk badly about you. At the higher end, there might be some positives mentioned, but they’re still going to have complaints. This is where a lot of customer churn and defection comes in.

Sometimes these customers may seem profitable, as many of them may be spending a lot of money with you. However, an NPS program isn’t about the initial revenue generated by a customer or account, it’s about customer lifetime value. Detractors are at risk of leaving your business and can even give your brand a bad reputation (and the lower scorers are likely to be difficult for your staff to deal with at times).

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What Is a Good Net Promoter Score?

Bain & Company, the originators of the score, consider between +30 and +40 to be a favorable score. (Why are we using +30, not just 30? Because it’s possible to have a negative score if you have more detractors than promoters). As you head up to +50, you’re looking at an outstanding result. If you’re at +80? That’s world class.

However, this will vary based on your industry and your location. Europe and Asia generally mark things more conservatively than the US. So, if you’re comparing your scores to your competitors, make sure you’re looking in the same place rather than at a global average. If your industry is one generally viewed negatively – think debt collection, or property management – then you’re generally going to have lower scores, too.

For this reason, it’s worth investigating NPS benchmarks for your industry, and your location, rather than relying on a general global average. It’s also worth focusing on improving your own score per quarter. If you go from 5 to 15, you may still be below the average, but a jump of 10 points is respectable and means you’re doing the right things.

5 Ways to Use NPS to Boost Customer Retention

Now you know what NPS is, it’s time to take a look at how you can use it to improve your customer retention. 

#1: Make Sure It’s Accurate

Firstly, you need to make sure you’re starting off with an accurate assessment. There are a few common mistakes companies make, including:

  • Asking leading questions on the survey
  • Promising rewards for higher scores
  • Using methods that increase bias (like face-to-face rather than anonymous online surveys)
  • Only surveying happy customers
  • Asking too many questions at once

Using “set and forget” NPS microsurveys can help you avoid these pitfalls.  By starting with an accurate assessment, you can take the right steps. Having a false image of customer success can be harmful, as issues will go unrecognized and unresolved. 

#2: Reach Out to Detractors

Responding to the customers who gave you lower marks is beneficial – both for finding out why they gave lower marks, and saving their business. 

Contact detractors right away.  If you can address their issue right away, you have a shot at keeping them as a customer.  

Even if you can’t meet their needs, it is important that their feedback be acknowledged.

If you lack the time to personally reach out to each detractor, you can still mitigate negative feelings by automating your survey response. Send an email right away to thank them for their response, and ask for more feedback.

Reading through detractor feedback, you’ll gain insights into why they wouldn’t recommend you and be able to adjust accordingly. For example, if half of the detractors respond with ‘processing time is far too long’, then you have something to work toward. 

Sometimes negative reviews are based on service factors, like the delivery company you used or customer support that is slow to respond. Sometimes, complaints won’t be directly about your business. For instance, if you provide companies with a virtual phone number, you might get complaints about it not working. Changing this can instantly boost results. Create the experience consumers expect by prioritizing improvements, drawn from their direct feedback.

Feed this data back into your product roadmap and to your sales team. Designing new products with these criticisms in mind can avoid the same issues in the future. Meanwhile, it also gives your sales team some leeway on what they can offer in response to these criticisms to overcome them at the point of sale or renewal. It’s an extra handy thing to add to their sales playbook. 

For instance, if a customer is concerned about delivery times, give your customer success managers permission to upgrade them to expedited shipping at no extra cost. If they’ve had issues with subscription software, offer them a feature upgrade. All of these solutions can turn your detractors into passive customers – and potentially even promoters.

Reaching out to Net Promoter Score detractors to boost customer retention

#3: Learn from Passives 

Don’t ignore this group of customers. While detractors are clearly telling you their business is at risk, passives are more likely to silently churn.  It is your job to find out why and whether you should focus attention on this group. 

Segmenting your NPS feedback by business size or other factors will help you decide how important passive feedback is. If passives reside in important accounts or user groups, you may want to understand the “why” behind their lack of enthusiasm. 

One way to do this is to customize the NPS follow-up question. If a customer scores you a 5 or a 6, ask them “What’s one thing we could do better?”   

#4: Engage Your Promoters

Not all of your effort should focus on your unhappy customers, however. You know that this category of people has positive things to say about you – so why not turn that into something official? 

Reach out to them and ask for reviews or personal testimonials you can use on your website.  You might want to automate asking for a review. That way you ask at the right time — moments after a promoter scores you a 9 or a 10!

If you don’t already have referral marketing in place, it’s time to implement it. Roll it out by targeting these promoters, who you know are likely to make use of it. 

This encourages customer retention by giving them special offers, but it also boosts acquisition at the same time. For B2B companies, this is especially helpful if some of your customers are well-known in their field, as businesses are likely to respect their opinion.

Referral and loyalty schemes aren’t always well suited to B2B brands, but customer marketing or a VIP program can work instead. Customer marketing seeks to deepen relationships by providing customers with multiple benefits. One such example might be providing access to your product roadmap as part of an advisory council. Alternatively, you could create a VIP ‘space’, where exclusive content and in-person events are offered.

#5: Thank Respondents

Reach out to your loyal customers, and thank them for being so. 

Getting an email that says ‘thank you!’ is a great boost and encourages them to remain loyal. Video can improve customer experience, so having a thank you video may be worth the investment – especially if it is personalized or includes some behind the scenes content.

While most of these efforts should target your promoters, some of them can be sent out to your passive base, too – potentially converting those 7 or 8 scores into 9s and 10s. Add value to your initial product through a higher tier service, exclusive access to industry information, or trade-in offers. These methods can tempt passive customers into a deeper relationship with you.

Keep Going 

Net Promoter Score shouldn’t be used as a one-off metric, but a regular measurement. To retain more customers, continue to listen to them, learn from their feedback, and take action. NPS is especially helpful for tracking if your tactics are working. You should see an improvement in retention as you begin to implement those suggestions above. 

Equally, you might see a drop if something changes, like an operating system update or switching to an IVR system to route customer service calls.  By regularly tracking NPS, you’ll spot improvements and problems quickly. You’ll know if something is working or not, and be able to mitigate negative effects as soon as possible.

NPS will help you improve the customer experience you’re providing and that’s the best route to customer loyalty. 

Retain more customers with InMoment, the #1 Net Promoter Score platform for SaaS

business man placing sticky notes on glass to outline employee and customer experience improvement framework
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The Employee & Customer Experience Framework for Improvement You Need in 2022

By: The InMoment Team

Every year, we at team InMoment like to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned about employee and customer Experience Improvement, and then put those top learnings into a “cheat sheet” of sorts for our readers. Building a customer experience program that helps you to differentiate from the competition is difficult—that’s where InMoment’s customer experience framework, the Continuous Improvement Framework comes in. This employee and customer experience framework will provide you with some of the best practices in the business to help you get the most out of your customer experience program.

So, sit back and read on to learn how our customer experience framework can benefit your business!

What Is a Customer Experience Framework?

As a starting point, it is important to define what a customer experience framework is. 

A customer experience framework is a set of processes a company implements in conjunction with its customer experience program to help the program be as successful as possible in its efforts to improve the customer experience, create a customer-centric culture, and positively impact the bottom line. It is like an map that you follow as you go through all the steps of gathering feedback from customers and improving processes based on the feedback.

Without a customer experience framework, it is hard to get consistent results you want. But with a customer experience framework, you’ll be able to make your CX program consistently successful, and adapt your program to scale and evolve with your company, customers, and the greater market.

The Continuous Improvement Customer Experience Framework

Your Path to Employee & Customer Experience Improvement Success

The key to InMoment’s customer experience framework, the Continuous Improvement Framework, is to move beyond merely monitoring employee and customer feedback. Instead, experience professionals need to focus on using that feedback to inform action plans. Customer narratives are a goldmine for companies looking to eradicate superficial and deep-seated problems. Their feedback allows you to identify issues, define remedies that positively impact the bottom line, and ultimately create more meaningful experiences.

Brands can achieve all of this by sticking to a simple, five-step  customer experience framework that we call the Continuous Improvement Framework: define, listen, understand, transform, realize.

Continuous Improvement Framework for employee and customer Experience Improvement

Step #1: Design

When folks start up their employee and customer Experience Improvement programs, they’re often tempted to start listening right off the bat. However, it is absolutely essential that experience professionals design their programs before they launch listening posts. 

Here are some notes from InMoment expert Andrew Park about the first step of the customer experience framework, design:

“Listening to customers is obviously an integral part of any well-built experience program, but it isn’t enough on its own, especially when brands don’t truly know what they’re listening for. Listening broadly can be helpful, but far more useful is the capability (and the willingness) to listen purposefully.

There are mountains of data out there, and the only way for companies to own the moments that matter (when business, customer, and employee needs intersect) and thus achieve transformational success is to figure out how to listen purposefully. That’s why it’s important for brands to design their experience program’s goals, objectives, and other factors before turning the listening posts on.”

Want to read more from Andrew? Click here to access “Why ‘Just’ Listening to Your Customers Isn’t Enough”

Step #2: Listen

Now that you know what you’re listening for, you can start setting up your listening posts. And whenever most of us think about employee and customer listening, we tend to also think about surveys. But what are the best practices and philosophies successful listening programs follow?

Here’s Andrew Park again:

“Traditional forms of listening usually involve long-winded surveys that focus on single points within brand channels. These surveys may also take a spray-and-pray approach, asking about everything the brand cares about—but that customers may not. Finally, brands may also spend too much time focusing solely on solicited customer feedback, which results in fragmented data. Fortunately, brands can be more versatile when it comes to collecting feedback.”

Want a succinct look at how to achieve meaningful survey listening? Get the four steps you need to follow in “How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys”

Steps #3: Understand 

You’ve collected data at strategic touchpoints using best practices. Now it’s time to leverage analytics to get to the actionable insights in your data. That’s when text analytics come into the picture. 

Text analytics are vital to your brand’s ability to understand your customer and employee experiences. You can have listening posts across every channel and at every point in the customer journey, but if you don’t have the best-possible text analytics solution in place, your ability to derive actionable intelligence from that data is essentially moot. And your ability to create transformational change across the organization and drive business growth? That’d be a non-starter without effective text analytics. Without them, all you have is a score, not any context or information on what actually went well or needs improvement.

It’s obvious that text analytics are vital, but in an industry full of jargon, claims about accuracy, and a huge amount of conflicting data, how can you tell what solution attributes will be the best for your company?

Learn everything you need to know about text analytics in this eBook.

Step #4: Transform

In our experience, we’ve found that the hardest step for programs to conquer is going from insights to action—and therefore, to transformation. This is also arguably the most important step in the employee and customer experience framework. 

Transformation is an important step of the process not just because brands can actively improve themselves, but also because it’s what your customers expect is happening. Customers wouldn’t provide feedback if they didn’t expect brands to do something about it, so bear this in mind when working toward providing the best experience for them.

So how do you go from insights to transformation? Learn the process in this article.

Step #5: Realize

This is what you’ve been building toward all along: realizing employee and customer Experience Improvement. But what does true success look like? How do you prove it to your business stakeholders? 

Here are some thoughts from InMoment XI Strategist Jim Katzman:
“Realizing success occurs when you can evaluate how well your program is hitting goals and when you can quantify the results. Even if you don’t hit a homerun against all your goals, evaluating what you have achieved—and what you haven’t—still gives you a great idea of what exactly about your program might need tweaking.

There’s another, more profound way to evaluate your experience program’s impact on the business, and that’s through the lens of four economic pillars. The handy thing about our model is that it’s broad enough to be of use to any company regardless of size, brand, or industry while also giving experience practitioners a foundation from which to evaluate additional financial metrics.”

Want to learn about the four economic pillars and other ways to quantify program results? Read Jim’s full piece here.

A World of Possibilities

With the right mindset and a proven employee and customer experience framework for success in place, the possibilities for your employee or customer experience improvement initiative are truly endless this next year.

With that, we’d like to say happy holidays from our team to yours!

CX Program Goals
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Three Steps to Align Your CX Program Goals with Business Initiatives

By: The InMoment Team

Has your customer experience (CX) program matured or just begun? Or is it somewhere in the middle? No matter where you’re at, CX program goals need consistent tweaking to be aligned to greater business initiatives. And with the proper alignment, your company can drive better decisions that will positively impact your customers, employees, and bottom line.

In our recent experience forum with Forrester, Goldilocks and the CX Paradigm: Too Little, Too Much, Just Right, we broke down the mystical process of melding a program and business together to work in harmony. It starts with three important steps:

Step #1: Develop a Strategic Plan

Okay, maybe you’ve been thinking, “this program’s been in the game for years, what do I do now?” or “I don’t even know where to start.” Do yourself a favor and take a step back. 

To develop a strategic plan, you need to zoom out so that you can focus on the overarching CX program goals that matter. What’s your company’s vision and how can this program play a key role? When you first identify the big-picture mission, the smaller decisions become easier. And then you can start to set trail marker goals that’ll push you towards the finish line. This will only work, however, if the CX goals you create are practical ones. Goals that are too aspirational will inevitably cause your business to lose organizational efficacy and buy-in. Make sure anything you set your program for is actually achievable. Remember: Quick wins build momentum for major buy-in in the long run.

Step #2: Establish Customer, Employee, and Stakeholder Essentials

Just because developing a strategic plan is step one doesn’t mean you’ll never have to revisit that strategy down the road. Your plan will need to continuously adapt according to several factors. Namely, who are your customers, employees, and stakeholders?

To flesh these core groups out, try analyzing the trends in your market from both global, regional, and local perspectives. What benchmarks does your CX program need to meet to stand against competitors and how will that fit into your company’s business plans? If that’s still not enough information, it’s also useful to look at how your specific industry (in terms of CX maturity) is evolving. Some industries are in the early stages and some have a long-established history. And that history makes a difference. 

Gathering these broader insights into the industry and market will help you to realize realistic goals and give better direction on how to move your CX program forward.

Step #3: Design & Assemble CX Leadership

You can’t have CX program goals without a CX team. There needs to be dedicated leaders consistently working on customer experience as your business initiatives and the business world changes over time.

One might think, “Why don’t I just have a few CX experts figure this out?” And you should let your CX pros do what they do best. But when customer experience exists in a vacuum, it ignores one crucial reality. Customer experience programs should be owned by and should encompass all parts of a business because it informs all parts of the business. Your program needs to be cross-functional to be truly successful and aligned with big-picture business goals. The more experts from various departments you bring in, the greater the perspective and outcome. The ideal CX leadership doesn’t look like a single team—it looks like multiple teams overlapping. .

If you’d like to learn more about aligning your CX program to business initiatives and how that helps you prove ROI for your initiatives, watch our recent Experience Forum with Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian here.

How to Prove CX ROI
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4 Reads That Will Help You Prove CX ROI

By: The InMoment Team

At the end of the day, investing in customer experience (CX) is about more than just the score. Sure, it’s great to see a boost in CX metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES, but what really drives impact? Creating tangible value for your business—and that means proving that sometimes elusive CX ROI. 

Historically, CX practitioners have struggled to assign a dollar amount to the value of their programs. And if that sounds familiar to you, that’s okay! Throughout our decades of experience helping the world’s top brands craft memorable, business-powering Experience Improvement (XI) programs, We like to call them the four economic pillars of customer experience (or the four pillars of CX ROI for short).

Curious about the pillars and how they support a foundation of bottom-line value? Look no further! We’ve packed this blog with information on each pillar, examples of programs who have found success in that area, and assets you can leverage to mirror that success in your own program. Let’s dive in!

Four Ways to Prove CX ROI (and Assets That Show You How)

  1. Customer Acquisition
  2. Customer Retention
  3. Cross-sell & Upsell
  4. Cost Reduction

#1: Customer Acquisition

A well-built voice of customer (VoC) program enables organizations to anticipate what new customers are seeking in a brand and thus be ahead of the curve. 

For example, a major athletic company sought to capitalize on acquisitions by optimizing its surveys to find new types of customers. By targeting respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 with specific questions, the company was able to understand this demographic and expand to new cities and demographics.The practitioners who ran this initiative were able to prove CX ROI by tracking the new customer acquisition, increases in unique customers, and market share growth that it generated.

In “Four Customer Experience Tools That Fuel Your Customer Acquisition Strategy,” we highlight four CX solutions you can add to your tool box that will help you bring new customers through your doors. They include Key Driver Analysis, Competitive Benchmarking, Microsurveys, and Multimedia Feedback. You can read the full piece here!

#2: Customer Retention

Organizations should never underestimate the power of service recovery—70 percent of customers who have a situation resolved in their favor will return to a brand, while a 10 percent increase in customer retention can grow a company’s value by 30 percent. Truly customer-centric companies can easily reach and maintain these percentages.

For example, America’s largest cable and home internet provider leverages VoC technology in their regional customer care centers (and are able to prove millions in CX ROI). They discovered that 3% of all respondents requested callbacks, meaning the brand had 1,000 customer recovery opportunities a month (or a whopping 12,000 per year). By combining this insight with customer lifetime value, the company was able to identify $23 million in recoverable revenue—directly resulting from customer retention! 

Our eBook, “How to Improve Customer Retention & Generate Revenue with Your CX Program” is an all inclusive guide to everything you need to know to make your program a customer-keeping machine. Read it here!

#3: Cross-sell and Upsell

Given that it costs 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, brands stand to gain a lot from finding new cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Organizations can leverage CX listening tools to identify what about a brand spurs trust and loyalty from its customers and take action to make those offerings even stronger. After all, nearly 50 percent of customers are willing to spend anywhere from 11 to 50 percent more with a brand they feel they can trust.

An example of this is a large cafe group that was able to capture feedback from its existing customer base, analyze their sentiments, and make fundamental menu changes accordingly. As a result, the cafe group saw a noticeable revenue bump that it was able to link directly to their program insights and subsequent menu changes.

Curious how your CX program can help you identify opportunities for cross-sell and upsell? Check out our white paper, “Understand and Predict Your Customers’ Needs with Customer Journey Analytics,” you’ll learn more about understanding your customer journey, identifying what matters most to your customers, predicting customer concerns and behaviors, and how that information helps you to drive business growth. Get your copy here!

#4: Cost Reduction 

Organizations can use CX feedback and employee feedback to both save money within operations and to simplify their provided experience. Are there ineffective processes that are costing more than they’re worth? Eliminating such costs can save companies time, resources, and revenue. (After all, training one employee can cost an average of almost $1,100!)

A top-tier mattress retailer used CX tools to install an exit survey for departing employees, giving them a greater understanding of employee sentiment. After implementing the necessary changes to reduce turnover and new hire training costs, the company was able to establish a clear link between its CX strategy and the ROI it helped to generate.
This infographic, “3 Ways Your CX Program Can Save You Money” lays out three areas where you can cut costs, lower cost to serve, and still deliver the same great experiences. You can access it here!

ROI
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Three Ideas for Showing the ROI of Experience Improvement (Once and For All)

By: Andrew Crowhurst, NZ Country Manager

Let’s be frank—establishing a customer experience (CX) program’s return on investment (ROI) is one of the greatest challenges that CX practitioners and the organisations they serve face in the modern experience landscape. 

Did you know, according to Forrester research, only 14% of CX Professionals strongly agreed that ROI from CX is well established in their firm?

Across all businesses, the entire C-Suite leadership team is looking to validate an experience program by understanding: what is the financial impact of my CX investment?

The dilemma we face as CX and EX professionals is that across our organisations people can rationalise the need and function of excellent customer experiences with relative ease. We easily create an “emotional connection” and take the leap of faith that our belief will be true.

However, at a business level, when we are looking to make decisions to invest more in our voice of customer and voice of employee programs, we as CX/EX professionals often struggle to show the return on the CX and EX investment and thus can miss out on further invested funds as the rational minds look to maximise returns on what is tangible.

Here are some suggestions I’ve put together to enable the organisation to be customer centric, but also to understand how that centricity adds value to the organisation beyond “emotional connection”.

First Up: Map Your Program to Economic Pillars

In order to prove business value, it’s essential to draw a line back to economic pillars. Here are a few examples of economic pillars that could be affected by your experience program:

  1. Customer Acquisition. Understand the market environment and changing consumer preferences.
  2. Customer Retention. Address organisational or procedural issues that negatively impact customer experience.
  3. Cross-sell and Upsell. Identify opportunities to expand loyalty and share of wallet within existing customer base.
  4. Minimise Costs. Find areas for achieving greater efficiency, eliminating unnecessary elements.

Next: Understand Your Driver Tree

While the industry conditions and expectations for a CX investment vary from one organisation to another, there are basic ingredients across the board that should be included in your benefits driver tree. 

CX practitioners have a much greater chance of proving financial linkage between CX and ROI if they can demonstrate CX’s ability to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce capital.

These pillars are fundamental to how a company’s CEO and CFO manage a business (and how both shareholders and the broader market evaluate a brand’s future viability).

When looking at the wider driver tree there are some more common areas of focus the VoC programs can focus on like a reduction on failure demand costs, a reduction of churn, an increase in tenure and more—see graph below.

Finally: Build Your Financial ROI Roadmap

To win the minds of your executive leadership team, it’s really important for each listening post (i.e. survey program) to think about the related operational and finance measures already being used by the business and link to those so the program is relevant. In other words, you need a financial ROI roadmap to continually point back to.

For example, your roadmap might include steps to reduce repeat calls or reduce wait times. An in-person brand could be focused on sales, basket size, queue time. For an episode survey like onboarding, it could be increasing product/service uptake or reducing early tenure churn. Your organisation already has success metrics that it’s focused on. Find out what these are and draw a link.

Focus where you can on cost saving assumptions first, as these models are typically easier to defend than revenue based models (e.g. reducing churn, increasing share of wallet, increasing average tenure or LTV). They generally require less calculations, less assumptions, and less time to prove an impact. For example, failure demand—where you identify the issues that drive avoidable contacts into the organisation—can be much quicker to identify and act upon. Empowering frontline teams to deliver better outcomes, increasing engagement and reducing staff attrition (or turnover) is another. But something like proving the multiplier effect on acquisition (so how WOM drives new business) is often a lot harder.

For more ideas on building a business case for your CFO (or anyone else!) check out this guide of our most frequently asked questions.

Upselling and cross-selling customers
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Proving ROI: A Holistic Approach to Upselling and Cross-selling Customers

By: The InMoment Team

Cross-selling and upselling customers gets a bad rap in the world of customer experience (CX). A lot of brands hesitate to enact full-on initiatives because they don’t want to come off like the worst stereotype of a pushy car salesperson to their clients, and while that’s a worthwhile concern, it’s not the true nature of cross-selling and upselling. In fact, when handled properly, cross-selling can let your customers know that you’re not just interested in their money; you’re invested in their success and the part you play in achieving that. If you want to learn how to telegraph that to your customers, you’re in the right place!

Being Mindful

The first tip we can provide for good cross-selling/upselling is to be mindful of what your client expects. This doesn’t ‘just’ apply to your product—it also applies to your relationships with your point(s) of contact and when customers expect you to reach out to them. Knowing that cadence is its own reward, but it also helps clients stay secure in the fact that you respect their time and bandwidth.

Another, deeper factor here is the notion of a holistic customer, which means getting your company’s departments together and working off of a singular, 360-degree view of said customer. Not only does this help your brand deliver a better experience, but it also helps you know what your customer expects, which informs your cross-selling/upselling strategy.

Best Practices

When you’re ready to upsell, make sure you reach the right point of contact. We know; that point sounds obvious, right? But consider that each part of your offering could sound more or less relevant to multiple people. So don’t bother reaching out to finance about your new marketing tool; instead, take the time to figure out who to talk to in marketing (CX tools are great for this legwork). That way, you’ll be able to reach the person who actually cares about a given part of your product, and they’ll appreciate that you did your homework to find them.

Once you find that person, be prepared to quantify your new feature’s business value. Don’t just reach out to clients thinking that they’ll appreciate a new element solely because it’s new—that approach is guaranteed to give off boiler room telemarketer vibes. Rather, focus not just on knowing what your new feature would do, but how it can help your customer specifically. Case studies, proposed use cases, and the like are extremely powerful tools here.

Good Intentions

This approach to cross-selling and upselling takes more time and effort than reactively reaching out to clients every time you have something new… but it’s also a much more successful tactic. Yes, getting the upsell is great, but doing the due diligence that our approach calls for also lets your clients know that you’re genuinely interested in their business success! When you’ve demonstrated that interest, your clients won’t just be quicker to pick up the phone at the same time next month; they’re going to actively anticipate what you come up with next. In other words, cross-selling and upselling the right way meaningfully improves customers’ interactions with your brand, making it simple to strengthen your bottom line and those relationships in a single motion.


Want to read more about how you can inform successful cross-selling and upselling efforts that will positively impact your bottom line? Read the full article by experience expert Jim Katzman here!

Prove ROI
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The Holy Grail of Experience: How Your CX Program Can Prove ROI

By: The InMoment Team

Every brand wants to crack the code to prove a skyrocketing customer experience (CX) return on investment (ROI). But obtaining stellar ROI is not a simple process, especially if businesses can easily become discouraged when it seems as if their CX programs aren’t producing the amazing results they expected. That’s why some consider it the “holy  grail” of customer experience! But proving the value of your CX program shouldn’t be a process that starts only after the work is done; to successfully show the value of your efforts, you need to consider how you plan to prove ROI from the very beginning. 

Additionally, it’s important to first recognize that the factors impacting ROI cannot be understood linearly. Every department within your company has a different perspective on how their area of the business affects ROI. This makes measuring ROI by customer experience not so straightforward. Your business needs a holistic view of your brand, customers, employees, and the market to drive ROI successfully. 

Here are three tips based on our eBook, “Five Steps to an ROI-Focused CX Program,” that will help your company build a CX program that directly increases revenue. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Design with the End in Mind
  2. Understand Your Customer
  3. Tailor Employee Behavior

Tip #1: Design with the End in Mind

Designing an experience for customers means not just meeting the present need, but the future one as well. This means optimizing the customer journey by adapting to what customers want—even if your business had never considered those ideas before. 

Your company needs to be ready to remove from, add to, and revise its CX program overtime. For example, our eBook 2021 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report, discusses how digital has been a trend in America and Canada long before the pandemic. The main point is that digital will stay relevant after the government removes restrictions, so businesses need to prepare for the future of digital customer journeys. 

As you already know, your CX program is a powerful tool. When your brand designs with careful attention to the intelligence informing you of incoming issues in the customer experience, your chances of increasing ROI improve immensely. In fact, one study found that a focus on the buyer’s journey reaps over 50 percent greater return on marketing investments than those that don’t. 

Tip #2: Understand Your Customer

Actionable intelligence stems from all kinds of sources and each type of data can contribute to your company’s overall knowledge of your customers. From CRM, to VoC, to loyalty, financial, transactional, and beyond, don’t underestimate the value of tons and tons of diverse information. 

By taking advantage of various data channels, Hawaiian Airlines was able to gain a deeper insight into their customers’ experiences. “InMoment appends upwards of 300 customer-specific data points to each response. As a result, Hawaiian Airlines understands the impact that seat location, aircraft type, departure time, delays, food, flight crew, stops, travel history, and other variables play in each customer experience. This extremely detailed analysis enables Hawaiian Airlines to understand trends and pinpoint the exact factors most likely to have significant impacts on customer satisfaction.”

The combination of CX, market experience (MX), and employee experience (EX) data gave Hawaiian Airlines the holistic viewpoint it needed to direct its CX Program towards greater business outcomes. And that’s the key! The right data can be a customer experience game changer and lead to better business performance.

Tip #3: Tailor Employee Behavior 

Now that your brand knows its customers, it can train employees to accommodate them according to their specific needs. Employees are often the most crucial contact point with a customer because they act as company representatives. What customer would stay loyal to your brand or purchase anything if they encounter an employee who fails to meet their standards?

This case study shows that there was a growth in NPS when the business conducted behavioral initiatives instead of primarily focusing on operational improvements. The data tells the truth! By involving employees your brand learns not only about the employee experience but the customer experience through their lens. When both business and employees work in tandem your CX program reaches a higher potential to increase ROI.

We just explained three tips to capture more revenue through customer experience, but there’s more! Read this eBook that goes over five essential steps on how to focus your CX Program on ROI.

ROI-Focused CX Programs
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4 Success Stories from ROI-Focused CX Programs

By: The InMoment Team

It’s easy to get hung up in the metrics when it comes to customer experience (CX). In fact, terms like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) have become synonymous with traditional CX initiatives. But in this modern era, focusing on the score isn’t enough to move the needle. Today, the initiatives that are most successful are those ROI-focused CX programs that zero in on business outcomes. 

At InMoment, that is exactly the kind of program that we help our clients to design. In fact, in the recent report, The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2021, our clients praised us for our “partnership and focus on delivering outcomes…[and] gave InMoment exceptionally high marks for enabling the ability to show the business impact and ROI of CX.” 

This is our mission, to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together. Ultimately, our clients are able to move the needle and go beyond managing their experience to actually improving it. With the right intelligence, businesses can empower the right people to take transformative, informed action in the most effective ways and drive value across four key areas: acquisition, retention, growth, and cost reduction. In other words, we help our clients build ROI-focused CX programs that yield better results for the business and better experiences for their customers and employees.

In today’s blog, we’ll walk you through four success stories from our clients who are moving the needle for their business with their ROI-focused CX programs. Let’s take a look!

4 Inspirational Stories from ROI-Focused CX Programs

Success Story #1: America’s Largest Cable and Home Internet Provider 

In an attempt to limit customer churn, a telecom giant partnered with InMoment to identify at-risk customers and immediately reach out to understand the issue and retain their business. The company installed InMoment’s customer listening technology within several of its regional customer care centers to enable immediate feedback following each interaction. 

Customers who give negative responses are asked if they would like to speak with a manager regarding their issues. Using real-time alerting, managers are notified of customer callback requests immediately. Three percent of all respondents request a callback, totaling 1,000 customer recovery opportunities each month (12,000 per year)

With the average cost of a triple-play package (phone, cable, Internet) being $160 per month, the average annual value of each customer is $1,920. Using this formula, InMoment presented the company with the opportunity to recover $23 million in annual revenue by implementing a streamlined process for identifying and rescuing dissatisfied customers.

Success Story #2: North American Fast Casual Giant

A fast-casual restaurant brand that has become a household name with it’s unique blend of quick, convenient service and mouth-watering menu items has seen tremendous success with it’s CX initiative. Since partnering with InMoment to get a better understanding of their experience and where they can take effective action to improve it, their OSAT score has increased by 34%. Additionally, the brand saw 4% revenue growth in just one year after implementing their new solution!

Success Story #3: Tesco

Tesco—a mammoth multinational grocery and general merchandise retailer—knows its customers want more than just a mundane, transactional grocery shopping experience. So it works to create a unique shopping experience for its customers by encouraging its 330,000 employees across the UK to give a little bit extra through a programme called, Every Little Helps. With this mantra at the core of the company’s mission, Tesco has grown to become the fifth largest retailer in the world with £48 billion in annual revenue and 7,300 locations in 10 countries.

Success Story #4: TELUS

Leading the telecommunications industry, TELUS is Canada’s fastest growing telecommunications company with more than 13.1 million customer connections. Whether it be personal, business, health, or security oriented, TELUS offers a full scale of innovative telecommunication products and services. To continuously improve their customer experiences, the brand partners with InMoment and focuses on and ROI driven strategy.

In just 18 short months, TELUS saw a $1 million dollar increase in annual savings, a 100% increase in customer feedback volume, best-in-class response rates, and a 1 in 3 recovery for customers that received a follow-up. Furthermore, by focusing their efforts to reach more customers with proactive recovery, they have seen a $5 million-dollar opportunity in churn reduction. TELUS can expect to see further increases in these areas due to their continuous attention to response trends.

The Importance of ROI-Focused CX Programs

According to third-party research firm, Forrester, 79% of VoC and CX measurement programs do not quantify the business impact of issues. This means that the programs who can successfully prove their value to both the business and the customer are leading the pack. 

Want to learn more about how we help our customers build ROI-focused CX programs? Take a look at The Forrester Wave:™ Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2021 here!

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5 Steps to Improve—Not Just Manage—Your Experience

By: The InMoment Team

Since the inception of customer experience (CX), the conversation about feedback and listening tools has largely revolved around data collection. Many brands have emphasized turning listening programs on immediately, gathering feedback from everyone, and using that feedback to inform both metrics and strictly reactive experience management.

Is there not a deeper layer to experience, though? Top-tier analyst firms like Forrester certainly seem to think so. That conversation about gathering feedback, about experience management, is being taken a step further to a new paradigm: Experience Improvement (XI).

Rather than being about reactive management and just watching metrics like NPS, experience improvement encourages brands to amp things up by creating meaningful, emotionally connective experiences for each and every customer. What follows are five steps to getting your program to that level.

Five Steps to Improve Experiences

  1. Design
  2. Listen
  3. Understand
  4. Transform
  5. Realize

Step #1: Design

Until now, most experience program frameworks encourage brands to turn listening posts on immediately and use gathered feedback to shape eventual goals. However, with experience improvement, this model is inverted to great effect. Rather than getting feedback first, forming goals later, brands should carefully think about what objectives they want their program to accomplish and design their listening efforts around those goals.

For example, does your brand want to reduce customer churn by a given percentage? What about increasing retention or acquisition? Whatever your company’s goal, your experience program can help you get much further toward it if you spell out concrete, numbers-driven goals before turning any listening posts on. Frankly, some audiences are also more worth listening to than others, and completing this step can help your brand better decide where to tune in and why.

Step #2: Listen

Once you’ve established your experience program’s goals and audiences, you can then turn your aforementioned listening posts on. Having determined which audiences to listen to before doing so can help your brand consolidate experience program resources toward much more helpful groups. For example, if you’re looking to boost customer retention, it makes more sense to focus on your established customer base than anyone who interacts with your brand in any context. This approach saves your brand time and resources hunting down helpful intel.

Step #3: Understand

After gathering more focused, relevant feedback through your program, take time to carefully digest it and sort out what might need improvement. An experience platform armed with capabilities like sentiment analysis can be a huge help here.  Additionally, it bears repeating that understanding your feedback means more than scoreboard-watching NPS—it means diving deep into customer feedback to understand common themes, praises, problems, and possible solutions.

Step #4: Transform

Understanding your customer feedback is one thing; using it to meaningfully transform the business is another. This is arguably the most work-intensive step of the experience improvement framework… and one of the most important. Meaningful transformation means sharing CX intelligence with leaders across the business (especially in the departments most relevant to the feedback) and working closely with them to outline and implement process improvements. Desiloing data is always a good idea because it gives employees a holistic view of the brand’s purpose.

Step #5: Realize

Realizing experience improvement means circling back to the goals you set forth in the design stage to ascertain how things shook out. Did you meet your program numbers? Perhaps more importantly, have the improvements implemented as a result of your program resulted in positive cultural changes? Having an initial goal to compare your outcome to is vital to realizing experience improvement… and simplifies proving ROI to request more resources for additional efforts.

By following these steps, organizations can transcend managing experiences and start meaningfully improving them. As we mentioned up top, Experience Improvement leads to the sorts of deeply connective experiences that keep customers coming back no matter what, leading to fundamental brand success.

To read more about these five steps—and brands who have found success with them—check out this article for free today!

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The Most Important Conversation You Can Have About Your Customer & Employee Experience

By: The InMoment Team

One of the most important pieces of advice we give our clients as they dig into their customer or employee experience strategy is to “design with the end in mind.”

This is really just our way of saying that when you map out your listening posts, choose your text analytics approach, or designate internal teams to lead program governance initiatives, you need to know what you are working toward. 

And that brings us to the most important conversation you can have with your customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) stakeholders. It starts with this one question:

What business challenges are we trying to solve with our experience initiatives?

Because that’s really the goal, isn’t it? It’s not just to measure the state of your experience. Not just to deliver insights from your data (regardless of if they’re actionable or not). The point of a CX or EX program is to improve your experience to improve your business!

For some, that might mean acquiring new customers or retaining existing customers. For others, it might look like reducing costs and increasing cross-sell and upsell efforts. Whether you fall into one or all four of these areas, your experience program can help you deliver value. 

Solving for X with Experience Improvement

This principle, what we call Experience Improvement (XI), is why InMoment exists. Our mission is to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together.  

Ultimately, our clients are able to move the needle and go beyond managing their experience to actually improving it. With the right intelligence, businesses can empower the right people to take transformative, informed action in the most effective ways, achieving better results for the business and better experiences for their customers and employees.

And it all starts with one conversation: What is the “X” your business is trying to solve for?

If you want to learn more about how your experience programs can solve for X, you can learn more here. You can also reach out to our knowledgeable experts to see how experience improvement can benefit your business today! Reach out and talk to us here.

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