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2023 Consumer Experience Trends

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2023 Consumer Experience Trends

Download the reports to learn what consumers want in 2023

 
Schedule a Demo

2023 Consumer Experience Trends

Download the reports to learn what consumers want in 2023

Customer Experience

What Is Predictive Analytics
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Unlocking Customer Satisfaction: The Role of Predictive Analytics in CX

By: The InMoment Team

In an era where customer expectations continually morph, businesses must always be a step ahead to keep their clients thrilled and engaged. And the most effective tool brands can use to stay ahead of the curve? Predictive analytics. “What is predictive analytics,” you may ask. Well, by thoroughly analyzing historical data, predictive analytics software can predict future customer needs and behavior, forging a proactive customer experience (CX) strategy.

A Deep Dive Into Predictive Analytics

Before we explore its role in CX, let’s unravel the concept of predictive analytics.

What Is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics is a sophisticated method that combines data, machine learning techniques, and statistical algorithms to predict future happenings based on past data. It provides a glance at the likely future by examining patterns and trends in the current data. Deployed across sectors, from finance to healthcare, predictive analytics helps drive informed decisions and actions.

The Methodology and Technologies of Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics revolves around three main stages: data gathering, statistical analysis, and deployment. This process starts with accumulating vast amounts of relevant data. This data then undergoes processing and analysis through advanced statistical techniques. Finally, the results are deployed in a practical form—be it a detailed report, a visual data representation, or an automated business operation process.

The Intersection of Predictive Analytics and Customer Data

Customer data forms the foundation for predictive analytics. By scrutinizing past customer behaviors, preferences, and interactions, predictive analytics can forecast future customer actions, preferences, and potential issues. It equips organizations with answers to key questions: who are their most valuable customers, what are their customers’ needs, or which customers are at risk of moving away.

The Role of Predictive Analytics in the Customer Experience

In the maze of business strategies, predictive analytics shines as a beacon, illuminating the path towards superior customer experience. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that can turn a plethora of data into insightful narratives about the customers, allowing businesses to not just meet but anticipate their needs. Let’s delve into how this transformative power reshapes the landscape of customer experience.

The Transformative Power of Predictive Analytics in CX

Predictive analytics revolutionizes customer experience in various ways, leading to impactful changes:

  • Proactive Approach: Predictive analytics transforms CX from being reactive to proactive, enabling businesses to anticipate and address customer needs even before they’re expressed. This proactive stance results in a more streamlined and satisfactory customer journey.
  • Tailored Customer Interactions: By providing insights into customer behaviors and preferences, predictive analytics allows for personalization at an individual level. The result is finely tuned interactions that resonate with customers on a personal level, increasing engagement and loyalty.
  • Improved Product Recommendations: With the help of predictive analytics, businesses can create more accurate and appealing product suggestions. By understanding the preferences and purchasing habits of each customer, product recommendations become significantly more relevant and effective.
  • Timely Customer Service: Predictive analytics can also help in detecting potential issues or queries a customer might have, enabling customer service to address these proactively. This results in timely resolution of issues, improved customer satisfaction, and an enhanced reputation for the business.

Reaping the Rewards of Predictive Analytics in CX

Predictive analytics brings an array of benefits to customer experience management, each one contributing to a more successful business strategy:

  • Enhancing Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction: By predicting what customers want before they even ask for it, businesses can provide a proactive and personalized experience that increases satisfaction and fosters loyalty.
  • Boosting Customer Lifetime Value: Predictive analytics helps identify the most valuable customers and understand their behavior, allowing businesses to implement strategies that maximize the value these customers bring over their lifetime.
  • Reducing Customer Churn: By identifying patterns that indicate a customer is at risk of leaving, businesses can take proactive measures to retain them, thereby reducing customer churn.
  • Enriching Cross-selling and Up-selling Opportunities: Predictive analytics can identify which customers are most likely to be interested in additional products or services, creating more opportunities for successful cross-selling and up-selling.
  • Catalyzing Overall Business Growth: By enhancing the customer experience and making operations more efficient, predictive analytics contributes to accelerated business growth and increased profitability.

Addressing the Complexities and Solutions of Implementing Predictive Analytics

While predictive analytics represents a potent force in sculpting remarkable customer experiences, the path to its successful implementation is not devoid of complexities. These challenges need to be recognized, understood, and navigated strategically to truly unlock the transformative potential of predictive analytics. Let’s first uncover the common hurdles that organizations face on this journey.

Unraveling Common Hurdles in Implementing Predictive Analytics

Navigating the path of implementing predictive analytics involves tackling several challenges:

  • Data Privacy Concerns: Organizations must handle vast amounts of customer data, raising critical concerns about data privacy, security, and compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
  • Lack of Skilled Resources: Predictive analytics requires a unique blend of skills in data science, statistical analysis, and machine learning – a skill set that may be scarce within an organization.
  • Integration Issues: Organizations often struggle with incorporating predictive analytics systems into their existing infrastructures, leading to compatibility issues and inefficient operations.
  • Real-Time Analysis and Scalability Problems: For many organizations, processing large volumes of data for real-time insights or scaling their analytics initiatives to accommodate increasing data loads can be a daunting task.

Roadmap to Overcoming these Challenges

Addressing these challenges calls for strategic solutions:

  • Building a Skilled Team: Investing in hiring and training employees in data analytics can help build a proficient team capable of harnessing the power of predictive analytics.
  • Data Quality Assurance: Prioritizing data quality is crucial – cleaner, well-structured data can significantly improve the accuracy of predictive models and forecasts.
  • Investing in Scalable and Integrable Analytics Platforms: Selecting analytics platforms that can seamlessly integrate with existing systems and scale with increasing data volumes can ensure smoother operations and long-term success.
  • Establishing a Robust Data Privacy Policy: Developing a comprehensive data privacy policy, complying with all relevant regulations, can assuage data privacy concerns and safeguard the organization from legal repercussions.

Wrapping Up

In the customer-driven era, predictive analytics has emerged as a linchpin to enhance customer experience. By harnessing data to forecast customer behavior, companies can deliver personalized experiences, leading to heightened customer satisfaction and loyalty.

InMoment is leading the way in integrating predictive analytics into CX strategy. The predictive customer analytics in InMoment’s XI Platform unlocks profound insights into customer behavior, helping businesses create not just reactive but proactive and personalized experiences. Investing in such technology will undoubtedly place companies on the path to sculpting a more engaging and gratifying customer journey.

The horizon of CX lies in predictive analytics. Is your business ready to seize it?

net promoter score drivers
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Decoding Customer Satisfaction Metrics: CSAT vs NPS vs CES

By: The InMoment Team

Increased competition in nearly every market is leading businesses of all types to search for ways to attract and retain their ideal customers. Customers have unprecedented access to information about products and services. And with a few clicks, they can compare your company with your competitors, and learn how others perceive you. As competition and buyer empowerment accelerated, customer experience (CX), is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage.

Not only does exceptional customer experience make customers happier, it drives desirable customer behavior. More purchases and renewals. More referrals and positive word of mouth.

When you start your CX efforts, you need to consider how to measure it. But “it” is a multi-layered concept, and to truly understand customer experience at scale, you may need to track three very important metrics. Together, these can give you insight into where you stand and how to improve your CX:

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  2. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
  3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Of course, no single metric is going to give you a complete picture, and you will have to discover how to adapt the big three to your business case. Nonetheless, these tried and true customer experience survey methodologies are used across industries, and are a great place to start as you grow your program.

What Is Customer Experience? A Quick Definition to Get Us Started

Customer experience (CX) is the cumulative impact of every touchpoint throughout the customer journey. CX managers first listen to the voice of the customer at various touchpoints in the customer journey, identify points of friction, leverage CX software and text analytics to understand why negative experiences happen, invent action plans to solve those problems, and, finally, use results to show the positive impact of improving customer experiences on the business.

With new technology and social media, we have more ways to listen to customers than ever before And, that means, we have nearly infinite opportunities to delight them—or disappoint them. And while it’s important to make improvements at specific touchpoints, it’s also important to measure and gain an overall understanding of how your customer experience is fairing across the entire journey.

How Do I Measure Customer Experience?

Measuring customer experience (CX) requires a layered approach that can include in-depth user interviews and gathering data at key points of contact, as well as tracking metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).

The Three Most Popular CX Metrics

What Is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a CX metric that surveys customers based on one question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” Customers who are promoters score 9 or 10. Passives score 7 or 8. Detractors score 6 to 0.

NPS Survey Powered by InMoment

NPS is such a valuable tool for measuring not just customer experience, but also customer loyalty, because it transcends single experiences. It is often referred to as a brand or relationship metric. The NPS question asks the customer to draw on the sum total of their experiences with your company, not just the most recent, making it a good indicator for repurchasing (and growth). As a result, it is often considered a “board level” metric.

It is paired with an open-ended follow-up question, like “Care to tell us why?,” so you also get rich qualitative feedback that can guide improvement efforts from product to support to marketing.

While NPS surveys are sometimes deployed once or twice a year, a good, modern NPS program will use “drip NPS” to keep an ongoing pulse on customer sentiment, so you can react in the moment, instead of after the fact.

If you are launching a customer feedback program, the Net Promoter cycle is a great place to start. However, NPS surveys are high level. How do you learn more about the experience you provide at specific touchpoints or transactions along your customer’s journey? This is where CSAT comes in.

What Is Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)?

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most popular transactional metric. A CSAT survey asks a customer how satisfied they are with a recent interaction—often a purchase or a customer service call—on a rating scale. CSAT is flexible and highly customizable.

You can also ask multiple questions in the CSAT format to create a longer survey (and then average those responses for a composite CSAT score), but we recommend you keep it simple.  An open-ended follow up question allows your customers to tell you what attributes of satisfaction are working—or not working—for them.  

CSAT Survey
Above is a 2-step CSAT survey on a mobile app powered by InMoment

You can also try other survey formats. Here is a smiley-face based CSAT survey embedded in an email:

Simple CSAT Survey in an Email

In the realm of CX, a short CSAT survey is most often used to gauge customer satisfaction with interactions with support personnel. It’s a great tool for identifying support agents who may need more training or quantifying the impact of your last team-wide training effort.

Customer satisfaction metrics are useful for gauging the ‘happiness’ resulting from recent interactions, which is valuable information, especially when you’ve been making changes and need to track the results. You will need to dig into the qualitative feedback you receive to understand which attributes of satisfaction are most important to your customers and which are areas that require improvement. In the food delivery example, those attributes could be promptness of delivery, quality of food, price/value, etc.

A related survey is PSAT or Product Satisfaction Score. This is an adaption of the CSAT survey that is popular with software developers and advocates of product-led growth. An example is an in-app survey that asks a software user “How satisfied are you with [this product or feature]?”  The specific, contextual feedback that users provide in a PSAT survey helps to prioritize a roadmap of product improvements.

What Is Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys ask the customer “How much effort did you have to expend to handle your request?” and is scored on a numeric scale. It’s a customer service metric that is used to improve systems that may frustrate customers.

Essentially, CES advocates believe that when it comes to customer service or support, “effortlessness” is the most relevant attribute of customer satisfaction. In fact, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) customer experience research confirms that exceeding customer expectations results in little change in loyalty. The CES survey helps you identify and remove obstacles, and solve problems, so your customers can find success with ease.

Here is an example of an in-app CES survey:

Here is another common way to ask the Customer Effort Score question in a survey:

CES Survey example

A CES survey is typically deployed after a support interaction. But, for SaaS businesses, the CES survey can also help gauge the effort the customer must expend to onboard with you, the process of installing and becoming trained in the use of software. Onboarding can be self-service or high touch, and likely a combination of both. These steps that lead to a customer’s first experience of value are critical to success.  CES survey feedback can help you get it right.

According to the Harvard Business Review, CES can predict repurchasing even better than CSAT, making it a go-to, critical metric for SaaS companies, that depend heavily on successful onboarding and customer success to lay the foundation for repeat purchases.

CSAT vs NPS vs CES

These metrics differ in terms of the insights they provide and the areas of customer satisfaction they focus on. CSAT captures satisfaction with specific interactions, NPS evaluates loyalty and advocacy, and CES assesses the ease of the customer experience. By utilizing a combination of these metrics, businesses can gain a more comprehensive understanding of customer satisfaction, identify areas for improvement, and develop strategies to enhance the overall customer experience.

How Do CX Metrics Work Together?

If measuring customer experience requires a comprehensive view, these three metrics help you get there. Net Promoter Score delivers the big picture of customer loyalty and relationship over the long-term. CSAT & CES are typically transactional metrics that can help you analyze key touchpoints in the customer’s journey. CSAT can measure overall satisfaction on a number of attributes so you can discover and refine those that are most meaningful to your customers. And, Customer Effort Score dials in on one attribute, effort, and is incredibly useful for smoothing the customer’s path to their desired outcome. 

You’ll always need Net Promoter Score, “The One Number You Need to Grow.” However, the numbers you need have grown. CX improvement takes focus, but modern survey platforms can help streamline the process. The reward is market success. When you edge out the competition through world-class customer experience—think JetBlue, Starbucks, Charles Schwab, and Trader Joe’s—your customers will reward you with repeat business and brand advocacy.

And remember, scores can only get you so far. They are a great starting point, but as you grow your customer experience program, you’ll be able to aim higher than just putting a few points on the board. You’ll be able to leverage the insights you gain from your program to influence big-picture business goals like customer acquisition, customer retention, customer lifetime value, and cost reduction across the business. Read more about how CX programs can influence your business here.

How Can I Improve Customer Experience?

Optimizing to improve customer experience begins with establishing a starting point with your current metrics, then designing your program, listening to customers, understanding the insights through analytics, and leveraging those insights to form an action plan. After you take these actions, you measure the response to your improvements and determine the success of your efforts. And once you’ve completed the cycle, it’s vital you do it all over again (this is what our experts at InMoment call Continuous Experience Improvement).

This series of designing, listening, understanding, transforming, and realizing is meant for agile companies and can be a challenge if you’re using a dated methodology.

For example, a traditional approach of sending out feedback surveys only once or twice a year (often via bulk email to all customers) means that it can take a long time to see results, and response rates can be low. However, always-on listening through various channels like social media, online reviews, and targeted surveys deliver results in real-time, which is especially vital for rapidly evolving businesses.

Once you have access to nearly instant customer feedback, the challenge becomes digesting it and taking action. And that’s where a partner with industry-leading, action-enabling text analytics (like InMoment) comes in.

Unlocking the insight from qualitative feedback is key to making the most of your CX metrics. Machine learning enables you to auto-categorize the topics and emotions in open-ended feedback, and do so at scale in real-time. Pair that with operational data about your respondents—like role, location, account, associated revenue—and you’ll be able to diagnose the “why” behind your scores and quickly prioritize improvements that will drive your business forward.

Customer experience isn’t just about making the customer happy during a single interaction, though it is important. In fact, each interaction is a small part of an equation that spans the entire relationship you have with that customer. With that in mind, you’ll want to start by taking stock of each potential interaction with your company, website, products, self-service support, and customer-facing representatives.

Improving the customer experience is truly a team effort, so you’ll want to systematically go through each touchpoint to see who is in charge of it, how well it’s working now, and what improvements are feasible to make in the short term and the long term.

Your Next Steps

Want to dive in deeper to discover what CX Metrics are right for your business? Check out our eBook on the subject!

CHEAT SHEET

CX Metrics Cheat Sheet

Get Away From Confusion & Gain a Clear Understanding of Your Customer Experience with the Right Metric

This CX Metrics Cheat Sheet details the top three CX metrics leveraged by world-class programs:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)

You’ll gain an understanding of how they work as well as the pros and cons of each measurement so you can choose the best match for your business.

Download the cheat sheet and do away with segmented views of your customer experience and gain a clear, integrated understanding so you can take action today!

Download Cheat Sheet
Voice of the Customer Surveys
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The Power of Listening: Mastering Voice of the Customer Surveys

By: The InMoment Team

These days, understanding your customers isn’t a “nice thing to do”; it’s an absolute necessity. To truly understand your customers, you need to spend some quality time listening to them and understanding the voice of the customer. That’s why mastering the art of the voice of the customer survey can be a game-changer for any business seeking to better understand its customers. The power of listening to your customers transcends beyond just collecting feedback; it serves as a strategic compass, guiding your decision-making, shaping your product development, and, most importantly, building strong, lasting customer relationships. 

Read on to learn more about voice of the customer surveys, why they’re so important, how to create them, and some sample questions that can get you started creating your VoC survey today. 

What Is a Voice of the Customer Survey?

At its core, a voice of the customer (VoC) surveys captures customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions toward products, services, or your company in general. A VoC survey involves gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers about their various touchpoints with a company. Touchpoints could be anything from an interaction with your website, chatting with your customer service representatives, or actually using your products and services. By exploring customers’ experiences with these touchpoints, you’ll gain a holistic understanding of your customer’s journey and experience with your company. 

Why Are Voice of the Customer Surveys So Important?

A VoC is more than just another survey to worry about. The benefits of VoC surveys extend far beyond mere data collection. They provide invaluable insights that can shape product development, fine-tune marketing strategies, and enhance customer service. Hopefully with all of these pieces in place, you’ll experience improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the power of VoC surveys lies not just in listening to what customers have to say but in using those insights to create a better, more personalized customer experience.

Let’s dive into three specific benefits from utilizing VoC surveys as the powerful they are: 

Understanding Customer Needs and Wants

At the heart of any successful business strategy lies a deep understanding of customer needs and wants. VoC surveys are literally the voice of your customers. They serve as a way to pull out real and salient insights into your customers’ needs and wants. These insights are the pulse of the market, reflecting real-time customer sentiment and demand. By tuning into the voice of the customer, you can identify what truly matters to your customers and adjust your strategies, products, and services appropriately. Your customers love it too.. VOC surveys provide customers with the opportunity to communicate their needs and wants directly to businesses.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

You created your business to solve a problem, and you want to make sure your products and services are actually doing that. The way to see if you’re reaching your customers the way you want is to evaluate your customer satisfaction. A VoC survey gives you the chance to do just that. Plus using these surveys can also help you boost your customer satisfaction on its own. Customers love the opportunity to be heard and understood, so when you’re actively working toward that, they’re going to notice and appreciate that. 

Improving the Business Overall

VoC surveys are not just about improving customer experience; they offer significant benefits for the overall health and growth of the business. These surveys help businesses pinpoint potential issues from the customer’s perspective, allowing them to proactively address these concerns before they escalate and cause significant damage. Whatever customers aren’t liking, with a VoC, you have a chance to stop that in its tracks. This proactive approach not only improves the customer experience but also strengthens the company’s reputation, enhances operational efficiency, and drives overall business success. 

Designing Your Voice of the Customer Survey

Voice of the customer surveys are powerful. How do you go about creating your own? Let’s dive into some of the basic steps for designing a highly effective VoC survey. 

Define Objectives

Before crafting your VoC survey, it’s crucial to define clear, specific objectives. What are you trying to do or understand? Are you looking for insights on a specific product or service you want to refine? Or are you looking to improve your customer satisfaction overall? Knowing what your objectives are will help you design a survey that gathers data to help with your goal. You can ensure the data you collect is actionable and relevant to your overall business goals. 

Choose the Right Types of Questions

Once you have clear objectives, you need questions that achieve your overall goals. The choice of questions in your VoC survey can significantly impact the quality and type of feedback you receive. To gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ experiences, it’s advisable to use a mix of multiple choice questions, scales (like the Likert scale), and open-ended questions. Multiple choice questions and scales are excellent for collecting quantitative data, offering clear, easily analyzable feedback. On the other hand, open-ended questions allow customers to express their opinions and experiences in their own words, providing rich qualitative data that can offer deeper, nuanced insights. A mix of question types will give you deeper insights overall. 

Keep It Simple

While it’s important to gather as much valuable feedback as possible, your customers won’t complete a long survey. It’s much better to have fewer questions and more complete surveys than the other way around. Aim to keep it simple and keep your surveys no longer than 10 minutes. The simpler and more streamlined your survey, the more likely customers are to complete it and provide honest, thoughtful responses.

Start Broad, Then Get Specific

When structuring your VoC survey, a useful approach is to start with general questions before delving into more specific ones. Starting broad helps your customers “warm up” to providing you with feedback. Broad, initial questions can pertain to overall satisfaction, general experiences, or perceptions of your brand. Essentially, your early questions should be easy to answer without too much extensive thought. You can narrow as you go to get more detailed feedback. 

Questions to Ask in a Voice of the Customer Survey

Those strategies can help you get started. To really take your VoC survey to the next level, we have some starter questions to help you write your own voice of the customer surveys. The questions we provide are broken up into general categories that you may want to consider on your surveys. 

Value-Based VoC Questions

  • Did you find everything you were looking for today?
  • Is there anything you were looking for that we didn’t have?
  • On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value of your purchase?
  • What are the most important qualities you look for in a product or service? (This question is particularly poignant as a multiple choice question)
  • Did our customer service help you resolve any issue you came across?

Brand Loyalty VoC Questions

  • How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1–10? 
  • When thinking about our brand, product, or service, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
  • What might prevent you from doing business with us in the future?
  • How likely are you to switch to a different brand, product, or service?

Customer Satisfaction Questions

  • How would you describe your experience with us today?
  • How satisfied are you with the product or service you received?
  • Was your customer service agent able to handle any issue you had?
  • What could we have done to improve your experience?

Final Thoughts

Overall, VoC surveys are powerful tools to better understand your customers and how they really perceive your company. Utilizing these surveys, you can further refine your products and services, enhance your customer satisfaction, and better meet the needs of your customers. 

Learn more about how a voice of the customer survey can help you build a better brand with InMoment today!

Utilities Brands CX
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3 Challenges Utilities Brands Face When Aligning Strategy, Ops, and Services to CX Needs

By: The InMoment Team

Customer experience (CX) leaders from utilities brands are facing unprecedented challenges in 2022. Increased government regulation and new market entrants with unique service-based offerings are creating a disruptive wave of change that traditional utilities need to respond to. But here at InMoment, we don’t like to merely dwell on obstacles and complexities. We like to provide you with strategies and solutions.

With that being said, Graham Tutton, InMoment’s Global Head of Consumer Products, has put some thoughts together around some of the biggest challenges facing the utilities sector, and what customer experience leaders can do about these for our latest webinar. And to save you some time, we’ve taken those and compiled them into this quick article.

Let’s dive in! 

Challenge #1: Disparate Data

Utilities companies typically have a lot of data spread across multiple silos across the business. The challenge is combining the operational, technical, financial, and even the metadata (like weather data) that is currently sitting in legacy systems or different departments, and is also aggregated with feedback data. Additionally, brands have not figured out how to tap into 85% of data—the unstructured kind—so they miss out on the bigger picture. 

Solve the Challenge: Combine Data Sources 

Many CX leaders in this space find it challenging to stitch together holistic customer feedback in one place, and know how to take action from it. At the end of the day, you need a single platform that can combine direct survey data from customers, but also indirect data (like social media reviews), and inferred data (like contact centre chat logs).

Challenge 2: Figuring Out Customer Trends

Because data is spread across the organisation, making sense of emerging customer trends is even harder. Businesses want to make the best decisions based on the available information. However, these decisions are often flawed because businesses do not have the ability to understand the data they’re looking at. Businesses cling to the easy insights floating at the top of their datasets, but often miss the deeper insights hidden behind unstructured data. 

According to IDC, 85% of enterprise data is unstructured and is growing at a rate of 55% every year. With this rate of growth, businesses that fail to adapt miss out on the bigger picture and are making flawed decisions based on only a small percentage of the data available.

Solve the Challenge: Text Analytics to the Rescue

Luckily, text analytics capabilities are getting better and better each year! Businesses should leverage human-led, knowledge-based taxonomies by finding a partner that offers high accuracy and actionability, offering economies of scale from a wealth of knowledge gained in your industry, language and use case. 

Challenge #3: Taking Action on Feedback

Some utilities brands find it tricky to know which actions to take after analysing their customer experience data. There are many reasons for this—most customer experience solutions require multi-language translation, human interpretation and maintenance, and continuous tuning of surveys. To make matters worse, because the process is so slow, the accuracy of the insights are impacted too. CX leaders are often stuck in the cycle of wading through data and less enabled to actually take action on it. 

Solve the Challenge: Have a Roadmap From the Beginning 

If you build your CX program around a roadmap (with clear checkpoints, of course), it will help you stay focused on your ultimate goals. You should be checking in with your roadmap monthly, and evaluating actions against the checkpoints every quarter. By constantly referring back to the original plan, it will help build your organisational culture around the customer, and this will definitely help with momentum of your program, taking you further than you could possibly go if you were shouldering the weight of the CX program alone.


To learn more, check out Graham’s full CX webinar designed just for utilities brands.

The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates
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The Secret to Improving Your CX Survey Response Rates

By: Eric Smuda, CX Distinguished Practitioner in XI Strategy and Enablement

It is a fact that CX survey response rates have been declining. Additionally, we are being surveyed more and more every day about every mundane thing in our lives. Even the federal government is in on it—an executive order in 1993 directed federal agencies to gather public feedback on how well they delivered services and to strive to offer a comparable level of customer experience with private companies. Orders similar to that one have continued into the present day.

But, with surveys being the lifeblood of nearly all customer experience (CX) programs, what is a CX practitioner to do to improve their CX survey response rates? Much has been written about the tactical things a survey owner can do: list hygiene,  fatigue or quarantine rules, visual appeal of the invitation, subject line, formatting, time estimates in the invitation, etc.  And while these elements can have some impact, they are temporary band-aids for the over-surveying problem.

The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates Is…

I’ll let you in on a secret: if you truly want to improve and sustain your response rates, look to your CX program (specifically your closed loop processes). There are two critical things any company can do to improve its response rates, and they tie back to the inner and outer loop concepts described in the Net Promoter SystemSM.

You’ve probably heard that it’s vital for organizations to close these loops, as doing so can help you achieve everything from Experience Improvement (XI) to enhanced customer retention and sustained business growth. That’s true!  But effectively closing these loops also provides an incentive and opens a door for continuous feedback from your customers or members.

The Inner Loop

The inner loop refers to the systems, processes, and teams that organizations use to respond to customers one-on-one to address negative feedback. Having an effective inner closed loop process is of obvious importance to any company that wants to keep its doors open, let alone create a differentiated and meaningful experience for customers. Fail to close the inner loop, and you open the “leaky bucket.”

However, if you can build a system that allows you to receive customer feedback, analyze it for actionable insights, and respond both meaningfully and expediently, you’ll have a much easier time retaining customers and extending their lifetime value. You will learn more about their individual preferences and may even potentially cross-sell or upsell them to additional products and services.

There is also plenty of research that demonstrates that customers whose complaints have been successfully resolved tend to leave higher review scores than customers who never had a complaint in the first place! Finally, by responding to customers when they have complaints, you demonstrate that you have listened and acted on their feedback, giving them a strong incentive to provide feedback again in the future.

The Outer Loop

The scope of the outer loop is considerably wider than that of the inner loop and requires more organizational resources, cross-silo cooperation, and team coordination.  Rather than focus on individual customer interactions and complaint resolution, the outer loop is about the actions your organization takes on the collective feedback you’re receiving to drive Experience Improvement and communicate those improvements back to a much broader segment of customers (if not your entire customer base). The one-on-one interactions that comprise the inner loop are certainly important, but the outer loop is all about incorporating those into a cumulative group effort to drive sustained Experience Improvement.

This improves your CX survey response rates by demonstrating to all customers that your organization truly does care about feedback and attempts to take action to improve the overall customer experience. This provides a feedback incentive even for customers who may not have shared it in the past, as they see the direct benefit.

Widening Focus

Click here to read my full-length Point of View on how focusing on your CX program will actually help you achieve better outcomes. In the meantime, take advantage of anything you might have learned here to meaningfully improve your inner and outer loop processes. I promise you you’ll see a difference.

supply chain crisis and the customer experience
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What the Supply Chain Crisis Means for Your Customer Experience

By: Simon Fraser, Vice President, XI Strategy

The ongoing global supply chain woes have created massive headaches for both customers and the brands that serve them. One of the many products of lingering COVID uncertainty, the supply chain crisis has resulted in steeper prices, logistics chaos, and a markedly lower supply of everything from video game consoles to garden furniture. Today’s discussion covers three factors brands should be aware of as they consider supply chain issues within the context of customer experience (CX).

3 Supply Chain Crisis Factors to Consider for the Customer Experience

  1. Manufacturing
  2. Logistics
  3. Commodity Prices

Factor #1: Manufacturing

The manufacturing gap is not the only cause of the supply chain’s current state, but it’s certainly one of the most important. As I’m sure you remember during the early days of the pandemic, COVID lockdowns weren’t restricted to offices and restaurants—many manufacturing facilities were also closed due to a combination of quarantine guidelines and falling demand. Now, as the world reawakens after what is hopefully the worst of the pandemic, the manufacturing sector is struggling to match the speed of reemergent customer demand. As a result, many brands find themselves with insufficient stock to actually meet that demand, which poses an obvious threat to customer experience.

Factor #2: Logistics

We’re all hopeful that manufacturing will eventually catch back up to demand, but production capacity is, unfortunately, just one reason the supply chain is currently creaking. The second factor to consider here is logistics, and how both shipping queues and an enduring truck driver shortage are preventing what goods can be manufactured from actually reaching store shelves. Many ships find themselves idling in harbors the world over, which of course increases shipping prices, while the aforementioned driver shortage is an outgrowth of the mass-quitting phenomenon the media have dubbed The Great Recession. Both problems further complicate acquiring stock and providing the experiences that your customers expect.

Factor #3: Commodity Prices

This is a more subtle element than the previous two, but no less important to understanding the supply chain. As it turns out, the higher prices that coffee, sugar, wheat, and other staples command right now aren’t strictly a byproduct of shipping or manufacturing problems. Rather, the reason they’re so high is because, to put it simply, customers bought and cooked with them all while stuck at home! This phenomenon feeds directly into the higher prices you’ve no doubt noticed while grocery shopping, and, of course, brands’ ability to purchase and make use of those same staples for their customers.

How Your Brand Can Respond

The problems I’ve touched on represent significant obstacles for any CX programme. Almost every industry is somehow being affected by the supply chain crisis, and though we all hope that things will improve soon, it’s imperative for your brand to take meaningful action in the meantime. Taking action will help you not just make the best of this problem, but will also help protect your customer experience and to maintain the connective relationships you’ve worked so hard to create. This is what the supply chain crisis means for your brand: action is more important now than ever before.

Click here to read my full-length point of view document on how best to take action against supply chain problems. I go into each of the issues I touched on here (and The Great Resignation) in more detail, followed by solutions that will allow you to continue creating powerful experiences and achieving meaningful change even in these uncertain times.

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!

Customer Incentives Customer Experience
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The Difference Between Customer Interactions and Customer Experiences

By: Eric Smuda, CX Distinguished Practitioner in XI Strategy and Enablement

Recently, a client asked me what we at InMoment thought defines a “customer interaction,” as there had been some debate on the subject within his team. I pondered the subject and brought it back to my colleagues. Quickly, we were asking ourselves not only about the characteristics of an interaction, but beyond that, what falls under the larger umbrella of customer experience? Is there a difference? Today, we’ll be diving deeper into these questions.

What Is a Customer Interaction?

Webster’s defines “interaction” as:

  • Mutual or reciprocal action or influence
  • To act upon one another

From this definition, we see clearly that two or more parties are required for an interaction; for example, a company or brand and a prospect or customer.  

What Is a Customer Experience?

Harley Manning, VP, Research Director at Forrester, once defined customer experience as: How customers perceive their interactions with your company.  He went on to define an interaction as when you and your customers have a two-way exchange.1

Neither Here, Nor There

So what does that mean when a prospect or customer browses your website but does not make a purchase? Or a customer clicks a link in your brand’s email, but does not go any further? According to the definitions above, those are not interactions.  But there are a lot of people in companies working very hard to get these actions to happen (click through rate and time on website/app are very common marketing and ecommerce metrics).  

If they are not interactions, what are they? I would classify them as engagements.  A customer has engaged with your brand, but there was no interaction, because it was only unilateral. Thus, not all engagements are interactions.

And here is where it gets interesting.  If the examples listed above are not interactions, but engagements, are they considered part of your customer experience? You better believe it.  

The Intersection Between Customer Engagements and Customer Experiences

Customer experience is generally held to be the sum of all interactions someone has with your brand and the resulting feelings they have about your brand. But are experiences limited to interactions or engagements? Do customers have to interact with your people, products, services, or digital properties for their engagement to fall under customer experience?  

Today, a company’s policies regarding diversity and inclusion, for example, or the politics, causes, and charities they choose to support have an impact on people’s feelings about the brand. I would argue that these are part of the customer experience as well.  There are prospects out there that will choose to never do business with your company based on these issues and other customers who become more loyal for the same reasons.

Returning to the Question

To return to the original question, I would like to suggest that customer interactions and customer experience are concentric circles. An interaction is a subset of engagement, which in turn is a subset of experience.

Customer Experience versus Customer Engagement vs customer Interactions

And companies have to be attentive to all of the ways customers experience their brands, products, and services. Whether or not an engagement ever advances to the level of interaction is an integral piece of the CX puzzle.

Want to hear more from Eric about customer interactions, engagements, and experiences? Stay tuned for the next post in the series!

Humanizing Customer Experience and Driving Customer Relationships
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How to Humanize Customer Experience & Drive Meaningful Customer Relationships

By: The InMoment Team

There’s a problem with how many businesses view customer experience (CX) data: human beings cannot (and should not) be distilled down to numbers. For many years, experience programs have hailed numbers as a sort of holy grail, but the reality is that numbers are no substitute for genuine human connection.

None of this is to say that metrics aren’t important, but companies should remember that they can only reveal so much about why customers may be experiencing an issue or even why they remain loyal to the brand. With that in mind, we’re going to dive into a few things to bear in mind while creating more human and more connective customer relationships!

Numbers Alone Can’t Tell a Story

Before we get into how to humanize and improve customer experiences, we first need to understand why structured data can’t give us all the answers. For instance, it’s common to send out Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT/OSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys after a customer interacts with a brand, but what do these scores actually tell us? A higher ease-of-use score, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean you made the customer happier or that you improved that customer relationship. You can speculate about numbers, but they don’t reveal the exact, organic reason why customers feel one way or another.

So, how can companies compensate for this lack of context? The answer lies in unstructured data and the Experience Improvement (XI) solutions that can turn it into actionable intelligence. That actionable intelligence, in turn, gives brands the chance to create a more organic, more connective, and more human customer experience.

How to Humanize and Improve Customer Experiences

Only when a business listens to human feedback can it respond with a more human customer experience. This means tapping into the voice of the customer by allowing customers to express feedback in their own words. 

Consider platforms like Instagram, Yelp, and YouTube. People can use these platforms to freely (and frankly) express themselves in a way that numbers cannot allow. The result is a form of unstructured feedback that your brand can not only use to trace the root causes of experience breakages, but also to empathize with your customers.

After accumulating enough unstructured data, the next step is to analyze and act on what you’ve learned. However, that’s easier said than done, especially if your CX resources are limited. That’s why it’s important to desilo data and share customer intelligence with your entire company. Then, you can get multiple departments to collaborate and act on their role in humanizing the customer experience (this approach also creates a single, holistic view of the customer for your organization).

If your brand can offer experiences that are far more human, that’s far more valuable than achieving any high metric score. And it goes hand in hand with customer loyalty. When a customer feels empathized with and known as a person, that customer will return to your brand—even if there’s a lot of competition—because their relationship with you has transcended mere transactions. This is the heart of Experience Improvement—answering customers’ search for meaning while strengthening both your bottom line and your marketplace leadership!
To learn more about what makes doing business so dehumanizing and why brands need to challenge themselves to humanize and improve customer experiences, watch this video!

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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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What Retail Customers Are Saying About Black Friday in 2020

By: The InMoment Team

We’ve all seen videos of customers flooding through retailer doors in the small hours of Black Friday. While many of us are still asleep on the day after Thanksgiving, these shoppers are getting their Holiday shopping started with doorbuster deals—but what about this year? Will those shoppers still be rushing to stores? Or will the concerns of COVID-19 encourage them to stay home and snag deals from their laptops?

Not the type to leave anything up to guesswork, our Strategic Insights Team asked 5,000 future holiday shoppers how they expect to spend their Black Friday. Here’s what they learned:

Most Customers Will Do Their Holiday Shopping in November

One of the questions our team asked customers was when they planned to do their holiday shopping. More specifically, in which month did customers expect to begin their holiday shopping? More than half (54%) responded that they would start shopping in November.

Here are some other important results to note:

  • 42% of respondents are planning to make purchases on Black Friday (in store)
  • 39% plan to purchase on Cyber Monday (online)
  • 19% plan to make purchases before Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Most Customers Will Shop the Same Ways They Did in 2019

Because 2020 is a year unlike any other, our experts wanted to know if customers would shop more, less, or about the same this year.

In a somewhat surprising twist, respondents noted that they were even more likely to shop on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday in comparison to last year. They are also more likely to save shopping until December.

Black Friday or Cyber Monday?

One of the biggest questions retailers have on their minds is whether customers be participating more in Black Friday sales or Cyber Monday specials?

Well, many retailers have expanded their online sales to be more of a Cyber Week, with the full week of Thanksgiving offering opportunities for customers to save on holiday gifts. And it’s a good thing, because the majority of shoppers say that they will be shopping both in store and online.

No matter where customers are this Black Friday, there’s no doubt that they will be grateful for the brands that prioritize their safety!

For more details about our findings on in-store versus online holiday shopping, check out this infographic! We outline:

  • How many shoppers will be in stores and online
  • What customers are saying about their experiences
  • What matters most to them in both places.
Holiday Shopping at a Mall
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What Holiday Shoppers Expect In Store & Online

By: The InMoment Team

Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?

If you’re unsure, don’t simply guess what your customers are looking for. Instead, check out this infographic we created based on a study we did that surveyed 5,000 North American customers about their expectations for the holiday shopping season!

What Holiday Shoppers Expect In Store & Online

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