Cross-selling and upselling have formed the bedrock of brand aspirations for their existing customer base for a long time now. For several years, it was also one of four economic pillars (along with customer acquisition, customer retention, and lowering cost to serve) my colleagues and I used to frame customer experience (CX) programs for our clients. Using these pillars allows companies to spell their programs out in financial terms, which is essential to quantifying their impact and gathering support.
While cross-selling and upselling existing clientele is certainly important, there’s actually a much more holistic (and ambitious) way to approach new business opportunities within your customer base: drive customer lifetime value (CLV). Focusing on driving customer lifetime value won’t ‘just’ help with identifying upselling opportunities—it will facilitate and create deeper human connections with customers and ensure mutually beneficial relationships built on Experience Improvement (XI). Let’s take a closer look.
Casting a Wider Net
Keeping customers around for as long as possible to sell them as much as possible is a great aspiration, but as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s much easier said than done. However, I’ve been advising companies on this very topic for a long time, and while it’s not simple, what follows are a few best practices that can help you continuously and consistently achieve that goal in ways that are mutually beneficial to you and your clients.
First, if you haven’t already, expand the data sources that you use to understand what your customers are saying and how they perceive you. Many of the brands I’ve worked with for a long time are slowly coming to the realization that they cannot stick solely to surveys or another singular data source to get customer insights and input. And, while surveys will continue to be important, they only give you part of the picture. Expanding your data repertoire to such sources as purchasing data, location-tracking data, web searches, social media, and online reviews is a must.
Next, it’s vital to take the long view when looking at your customer relationships. This may seem like an obvious tip, but you might be surprised at how many brands get caught up in the lure of “what can I sell you today?” without considering what seeds to plant for even more success tomorrow. Equally important is to understand how your competitors view this dynamic and what, if anything, they’re also doing to be proactive when it comes to building lifetime value.
Letting Customers Tell Success Stories
If there’s one thing I loved doing when I was on the client side as a CX program owner, it was telling stories. I can speak from experience when I say that letting customers do the success storytelling is an amazingly powerful way to build lifetime value with them. Good storytelling can bring numbers to life, further personalize customers’ experiences, and it gets attention because customers and even employees generally relate more to stories told by, well, other customers.
Executives and program stakeholders love customer-told success stories too. Letting customers do the talking helped me gain mindshare, helped me secure budget, and created the sponsorship that I needed to help make my program better. This strategy also helps executives feel a human connection to your CX program; they love to hear stories about how the organization created a meaningfully improved experience for another person.
The Customer Lifetime Value Journey
The tips I’ve outlined here will help you start (or jump-start) your customer lifetime value journey, but how do you keep the ball rolling? What other methods out there can brands and organizations leverage to go beyond ‘just’ cross-selling and upselling?
You can find all of that and more by clicking here and reading my latest point of view article on customer lifetime value. You’ll learn what else your organization needs to do to create Experience Improvement and a more human connection to your existing customers!
CX operations, or customer experience operations, are all about the systems, automation, and lines of communication that make possible a unified, cross-functional approach to improving customer experience. Do you need a customer experience manager dedicated to managing this effort? Let’s find out.
Getting customers to fall in love with your company requires understanding the entire customer journey—so you can deliver a seamless experience at every touchpoint.
That’s not too tall an order if you are a young startup with only a handful of employees, all focused on customer experience (CX). After all, in those early stages, they have no choice but to study every step in the journey. By nature, a startup is all about the big picture.
However, as your company begins to scale, you may face the same challenges as large enterprises. CX efforts then become more specialized, and that’s when silos begin to form. Before you know it, you’ve got different departments using separate technologies and focusing on different metrics—fragmenting your understanding of the customer experience.
That’s when it’s time to consider hiring or appointing a CX manager. At this point, you need someone who can break down those silos, unify your tech stack, and unite your directors, VPs, and business units in the ultimate goal of creating a friction-free, productive, and delightful customer experience—from onboarding to renewal and advocacy.
What Is a Customer Experience Manager (CX Manager) ?
In order to understand what a CX Manager does—and why the role is so vital as companies scale—let’s picture a growing SaaS company, for example, that is considering adding this role. They’ve got a sales team focused on enterprise sales, a customer success team that largely spends its time making onboarding simple and straightforward, and a customer support team that’s available to fix problems. And of course, they’ve got a product team constantly working to improve their software with customers in mind.
Obviously, they have plenty of other departments, and each affects the customer experience to varying degrees (e.g., marketing, finance), but let’s focus on these four for the point of illustration. Each department has its own set of metrics, uses its own software, and focuses its attention on one specific leg of the customer journey.
The issue? You’ve got four different departments using different technology to record different metrics and measure their own aspect of the customer journey. It’s like the old story about the blind men who discover an elephant in the forest. They each know only one part of the elephant—the part they can touch—so nobody can agree what an elephant is actually like. After all, they’re each focused on a different body part (the trunk, the body, the leg, the tail).
The role of a CX manager is to determine, implement, and refine the CX technology and vision required to see the entire customer journey from the customer’s perspective.
This role determines the best way to collect, analyze, and act on voice of customer data at key touchpoints across the customer journey.
Determine how, technically, to monitor sentiment at critical touchpoints. For example, what system “knows” when a user is “onboarded”? How can that data be used to trigger a request for feedback? In what customer experience management platform?
Facilitate close-the-loop action. Enable stakeholders to respond to customer feedback quickly by moving feedback into the systems they use everyday.
Democratize insight and action. This can mean creating CX dashboards that provide stakeholders with the ability to monitor and research what they care about. And, more importantly, to understand what actions they need to take in order to improve the over all customer experience.
So, What Does a CX Manager in Action Look Like?
The Salesforce Solution Architect and Senior Application Engineer who holds the cross-functional CX technology vision at Glassdoor shares, “The InMoment platform allows our Support team to segment feedback by agent and other relevant business drivers to uncover insights that contribute to optimizing our support function, and it can also reveal bottlenecks that are best addressed by improving product features or design.”
Define a single source of truth for the voice of the customer (VoC). This can include determining where data will be aggregated into a single VoC feedback hub for research into and across journey points.
Work with vendors and cross-functional stakeholders to implement the technology vision. Often this happens in a phased project approach, touchpoint by touchpoint.
Keep the focus on the big picture—to understand that the elephant is more than the trunk, the body, the leg, or the tail.
Try as they might, individual departments have a hard time seeing the big picture since they’re so specialized (and are rarely incentivized by big picture metrics). That’s where the CX Ops manager or CX manager enters the picture.
What Kind of Background Should a CX Manager Have?
We’ve seen a wide range of candidates succeed in the role of CX manager—from Salesforce Administrators to Senior Sales Ops professionals to Customer Success or Customer Experience/VoC leaders. Even marketing folks have successfully led CX ops efforts.
It makes sense that good CX people would come from different backgrounds, since this role is about as cross-functional as it gets. What we can tell you is that there are certain qualities and skill sets, rather than specific career trajectories, that predict success in this role.
4 Qualities to Look for in a CX Manager
Quality #1: Diplomacy and Negotiation Skills
The person heading up CXOps must have some serious interpersonal skills, able to balance all the stakeholders’ needs and drives with the overarching goals and available resources. They’ll need to convince a range of departments—not just the customer-facing ones—just how vital these efforts are to the long term success of the company.
They will lead team meetings, communicate strategies, and move projects forward while holding everyone to a timeline (including executives). On top of that, they must be able to obtain a clear mandate and buy-in from their C-suite sponsors (or the head of CX, at the very least). In other words, they must possess both empathy and assertiveness in spades.
Quality #2: Deep Understanding of How the Tech Stack Works as a System
Your various technology platforms (Zendesk, InMoment, Gainsight, Salesforce, Slack, Segment, etc.) need to work together as a system. Otherwise, your information silos stay intact and your customer journey remains fragmented.
On top of that, they’ll need to find the gaps in your current capabilities and identify solutions to fill them. Sometimes this involves purchasing entirely new systems, other times it’s simply a matter of integrating what you’re currently working with. Usually, it’s a bit of both.
Quality #3: Project Management Mastery
Your Customer Experience Operations Manager will need some serious project management chops, including the ability to plan out timelines and budgets end-to-end (and get everybody to stick to them). They also need to know how to purchase from vendors without using an RFP.
Quality #4: A Strong Understanding of Procurement
“Let’s spend more money on systems just because we can!” Said no executive, ever.
Executives have grown wary of new B2B software that promises to solve all their problems, and middle-management is rarely overjoyed at the prospect of retraining staff on new platforms. That said, sometimes the current systems don’t cut it, and it’s up to the CX ops manager to understand the tradeoffs when evaluating new technology and delivering an integrated system that gets the job done.
Use Case: What a Fully-Integrated CX Initiative Looks Like
Every integrated CX initiative will look different depending on your existing technology, current integrations, and where you are in your growth cycle. That said, the following is a bird’s eye view of a solid CX initiative, and it should help get you started.
We’ll assume you have created a customer journey map and can tell your CX ops manager the make-or-break touchpoints that you want to optimize. You’ll also be responsible for forming a cross-functional team of stakeholders that are committed to improving the journey and to supporting the efforts of the CX manager.
Technology Needs Assessment
The CX ops manager should meet with each stakeholder team to understand:
The technology they are using today
Their CX data needs. This goes beyond metrics. It includes the customer data each team needs to make data segmentation and analysis useful. For example, support may need to associate customer satisfaction (CSAT) feedback with an agent. Success might need to know the user’s account, role, or pricing plan. Product may want to know how long a survey respondent has been a platform user.
Gather Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) data (examples)
Onboarding data: Calculate Customer Effort Score (CES) from surveys following the WalkMe onboarding tour (via Segment event data or Salesforce workflows)
Customer satisfaction data: Conduct CSAT surveys after Zendesk or Service Cloud case closures.
Product satisfaction data: Collect PSAT data after feature use (in-app) and after closing the loop on customer service interactions (in chat or via email)
Support tickets: The content of support inquiries is a source of VOC.
Reviews: What are customers saying about your on Capterra or G2?
Brand or user surveys: Any open-ended feedback from lengthy surveys.
Addressing Customer Pain Points and Closing the Loop
Strengthen the front line: Make it easy for teams to respond directly to customers by getting survey responses into the systems they live in. Populate the data in real time. For example, send InMoment survey responses to contact and account records in Salesforce for the sales team, to Intercom for Support, to Gainsight for Success or to Slack for the product team.
Leverage your happiest customers: Send review and referral requests to promoters via Marketo, HubSpot, or another customer communication platform like Intercom
Big Picture Analysis
Create a roadmap: Allow qualitative feedback to drive your plan for CX improvement. Use it to understand the why behind the metrics, prioritize projects by predicting the potential impact on customer lifetime value. Build text analytics dashboards and reports that are customized for each team (support, success, Product, etc.) in your CXM platform. (Hint: InMoment can do this!)
Centralize your data: Build a central voice of customer (VoC) repository for deep analysis. This can mean augmenting customer journey feedback with support ticket content, online reviews, and brand surveys.
Integrate CX into business analysis: Export metrics and metadata to the company’s data lake/business intelligence tool.
Note: It’s absolutely vital to use a CX management platform that integrates smoothly with new and existing systems.
The Value of Executive Buy-in and Support
As you can see, the success of your integration efforts will rest largely on the shoulders of your new CX manager, who will have their finger on the pulse of the entire customer experience. They’ll connect departments that normally go days or weeks without interacting, so in order to set them up for success, they’ll need support from senior management.
Why is that so important? It’s all about in-group bias. It’s human nature to think of the world in terms of “us” vs. them,” or “our department” vs. “their department.” This potentially puts CX ops at odds with, well… literally every department they encounter—unless the executive sponsor puts those worried minds at ease.
With executive buy-in and support, the CX ops Manager will have the authority and credibility they need to suggest the (sometimes) sweeping changes that would otherwise produce fear and resentment in those who have grown comfortable in their silo. A supportive c-suite executive can assure skeptics that this is the natural evolution of their efforts to serve customers at every stage in the journey. In turn, this paves the way for long term growth and success for the organization as a whole.Customer Experience Operations leaders chose InMoment for customer experience management. Book a consultative demo today.
Welcome back to the XI Café Podcast! The XI Café Podcast was created so that CX program owners around the world could join the conversation and learn from global businesses and industry experts about the latest experience improvement innovations in technology and research services, industry and market expertise, and customer (CX) and employee (EX) engagement best practices.
In this episode of the XI Café Podcast we’re talking to Commonwealth Super Corporation‘s (CSC) Katie Bogg. Katie shares how CSC relaunched its CX program to transform the business from the inside out—this includes growing the CX team and launching a series of external and internal initiatives to increase member engagement, leading to a tangible uplift for the entire organisation and its members.
Where to Find the XI Café Podcast
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music, but if you are eager to jump right in then you can click the play button below to start listening to this week’s episode!
More of a visual person? No worries. You can also find the video recordings off the XI Café Podcast on our YouTube channel!
As people gather this time of year to reminisce and look toward the future together, everyone at InMoment agrees that 2022 brought some XI-ting adventures! It’s thrilling to embark on another promising year, and we want to ring in 2023 with a recap of our top five InMoment Highlights from the last 12 months.
Five of Our Favorite InMoment Highlights From 2022:
#5: InMoment Appoints Executive Chairman John Lewis as Chief Executive Officer
#4: InMoment Demonstrates Commitment to Disability Inclusion With the Industry’s First Accessibility Compliance
#3: InMoment Acquires Leading Customer Review Management Company ReviewTrackers
#2: InMoment Named a Leader in People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms Report for Q2, 2022
#1: CX Program—Elevate—Wins International Customer Experience Awards
#5: InMoment Appoints Executive Chairman John Lewis as Chief Executive Officer
This year, we welcomed a familiar friend as our brand new CEO. John Lewis, who has served over the past few years as InMoment’s Executive Chairman, brings deep expertise in the information services and software analytics sectors, as well as significant experience transforming and scaling rapidly growing businesses.
In his role as Global President of Nielsen Holdings, Lewis oversaw businesses comprising approximately two thirds of the company’s overall revenue, helping to accelerate revenue growth and enhanced profitability in those segments and for the company as a whole. His relevant industry expertise and experience leading global organizations will enable InMoment to continue to execute on its growth strategy, while enhancing its ability to help clients around the world integrate customer signals and transform their customer outcomes.
#4: InMoment Demonstrates Commitment to Disability Inclusion With the Industry’s First Accessibility Compliance
At InMoment, we’re committed to creating a more inclusive world for everyone, and that’s why we’re especially proud of this one. This year, we achieved compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), becoming the first experience management solution to achieve this milestone.
WCAG compliance means digital content is accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing impairments, speech disabilities, limited movements and more. The InMoment platform is fully WCAG 2.0 AA compliant in the areas of readability, contrast ratio, scalability, cognitive keyboard operation, and screen reader support.
#3: InMoment Acquires Leading Customer Review Management Company ReviewTrackers
It’s exciting to look back and highlight theInMoment Acquisition of ReviewTrackers, an award-winning customer review management software company! InMoment is the first experience company to extend customer insights, analytics, and action across the complete customer lifecycle.
The companies joined forces to offer the unique ability to expand beyond surveys to include social ratings and reviews, access a larger share of customer voice, manage online reputation, and improve experiences at an unparalleled scale while driving authentic connections with customers.
“Review and reputation management are central components of a broader customer experience ecosystem. At ReviewTrackers, we fundamentally believe that your brand’s success depends on your customer’s voice,” said Chris Campbell, CEO ReviewTrackers. “By joining InMoment, we have a remarkable opportunity to broaden the scope of our solutions and strengths to provide an integrated system that will help our clients better acquire and retain their customers.”
#2 InMoment Named a Leader in People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms Report for Q2, 2022
InMoment was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms, Q2, 2022. Forrester Research, Inc. evaluated 13 of the most significant text analytics vendors across 29 evaluation criteria, and named InMoment along with only four other vendors as a Leader in the evaluation.
In its vendor profile of InMoment, Forrester states that the company’s acquisitions of MaritzCX in 2020 and Lexalytics in 2021 are “…paying off—the acquisitions beef up InMoment’s people-oriented text analytics capabilities and enable it to address all relevant use cases (beyond just VOC or CX analytics).” The report states “InMoment XI is a solid choice for customers who want a platform with a well-balanced mix of knowledge and ML-based AI, the ability to deploy OOTB solutions quickly, and deep custom application development capabilities (especially for embedded analytics).”
#1: InMoment’s CX Program—Elevate—Wins International Customer Experience Awards
This year, Inmoment won three medals in the 2022 International Customer Experience Awards (ICXA), including silver medals in Best Measurement in Customer Experience and Best B2B Customer Experience Strategy and a bronze medal in Best B2B Customer Experience.
InMoment’s Elevate program is a robust Experience Improvement (XI) program that leverages customer and employee feedback data to inform business decisions.
“Elevate provides valuable insights that inform key business decisions and automates action to improve our customers’ experiences.” Josh Marans, Director of Experience Improvement at InMoment, said, “It’s an honor to earn industry recognition for our differentiated approach to CX.”
InMoment is proud to have another fantastic year in the books and is looking boldly to 2023 as it continues to partner with the world’s best and brightest brands to improve experiences, break barriers, and create lasting business impact!
It’s been a crazy year for customer experience (CX), hasn’t it? Customers are factoring all sorts of new challenges and preferences into their brand decisions, and lots of companies have been busily playing catch up!
As we take off for the holidays (and hopefully get a chance to catch a relaxing break!) It’s normal to look toward the new year and wonder what’s next. Well, at InMoment, knowing what’s next is in our DNA, and we’ve put together some of this year’s tip-top webinars to share what we’re seeing and help you make 2023 your best CX year yet!
4 Must-Watch CX Webinars
Webinar #1: Designing, Actioning, and Proving an ROI-Focused CX Program
ROI has always been a hot topic in the CX world, and it only got hotter in 2022. A lot of organizations struggle to link their CX efforts to ROI, which makes securing additional support and funding very difficult. In this first webinar, experts Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda take a look at this common, fundamental CX challenge and pour decades of experience into helping you overcome it. The webinar dives into:
The state of experience ROI & how we can bridge the gap
Webinar #2: Leveraging Customer Data to Craft Seamless, Differentiated Experiences In-Store and Online
Data was another big topic in 2022, and we can already tell it’s going to blow up even bigger next year. As we often say, data is as much an art as it is a science. Having data is great, but finding ways to sort through the noise to find actionable insights is what’s going to create actual Experience Improvement (XI).
We got two of our very own CX gurus, Radi Hindawi and David van Brocklin, to spill the beans on this data journey and how everyone, brands and customers, can get the most out of it, including:
How democratizing your data for an integrated view of experience creates consistency
How to increase organizational intelligence across your different stakeholders (from frontline to c-suite)
How can you increase loyalty and advocacy in this constantly changing market?
Webinar #3: Digital Acceleration: How to Start the Next Digital Trend
Being a trendsetter in your marketplace isn’t just fun; it helps your customers have meaningful experiences and helps you stay at the top! We put together a webinar on how organizations can create trends, not just follow them, and the insights from experts Radi Hindawi and Chris Chan made it a hit!
To give a quick recap, Radi and Chris talked about how digital transformation should no longer be the goal for companies; just a baseline. They then dove into the four steps that every brand should take to become a trendsetter in their verticals.
Want to see what those steps are? You can watch and find out here!
Webinar #4: Everything You Wanted to Know About CX ROI But Were Afraid to Ask
Like we said up top, ROI was a big topic this year. So big that we couldn’t confine it to one webinar!
After wrapping up our first ROI webinar of the year, we knew there was still a lot of ground to cover when it came to this important topic. We also saw an opportunity to collaborate with our close friends at Forrester Analytics and invited one of their top researchers, Judy Weader, to share her research on the subject. She and our very own Jim Katzman teamed up to discuss:
How brands are proving the value and ROI of CX and why it should matter to you
The steps you can take today that will set you and your program up for success
What it takes to shift from just sending surveys to being truly customer centric
The art of designing digital experiences that make a difference today
These webinars cover important topics and will help you reach your experience goals in the new year. We had a lot of fun making them and hope that you’ll get a similar experience from watching them. Once you’re done, we have other resources you should check out as you consider your experience goals and how to keep owning the moments that matter. Happy Holidays!
What do expert survey builders know that makes them so successful? Well, they’re always designing with the end in mind. From the very beginning, they’re thinking about outcomes such as:
Why does this matter to my customers?
How will I act on this feedback?
What will my business gain?
Strong and insightful surveys help businesses understand what they are getting right and where they need improvement. However, if your survey isn’t set up to ask the right questions at the right time, the data becomes irrelevant.
Meaningful Experiences Start With Meaningful Data
To understand your customers and to get the most out of what they’re telling you, your survey design strategy needs to be spot on. Customers are often put off by long survey forms with irrelevant questions, which hinders their overall experience and can contribute to:
Declining Response Rates: Respondents fail to complete the survey and others may refuse to participate based on previous unpleasant experiences.
Poor Quality Data: Respondents rush to get through surveys filled with questions that are irrelevant to them, or are forced into selecting answers which do not represent their true or complete feelings.
Missing Information: Respondents don’t have the opportunity to leave feedback in their own words on what went well and what could be improved.
Customers who decide to leave feedback through a survey which is built without consideration are becoming disengaged with the very feedback process designed to improve their experiences. But don’t worry, we will walk you through how to be the type of survey builder that takes into account the feedback experience, so that you can understand what actions need to be taken to improve customer experiences and even address your customers future needs!
Build Better Surveys to Improve Customer Experience
A well designed survey gives your business access to a fountain of knowledge directly from your customers, detailing how you can better improve your product and service offerings to entice customers to do business with you time and time again. And who wouldn’t want access to that information?!
Better surveys means better customer information for your organization to act on, but it also means giving the customer a more consistent, relevant feedback experience. One that doesn’t interrupt, but is a mere continuation of their experience with your brand.
If the survey questions are sent to the customer two months after their experience and the questions aren’t allowing that customer to express what they want to say, then it’s completely pointless. You will be receiving irrelevant, outdated information and the customer will also be frustrated and put off from leaving feedback.
To get the most out of your surveys you should:
Listen to your customers in real-time, when the experience is still fresh in their minds so you can capture the most information.
Ask the right questions about the main touchpoints of their journey, not just the start and end.
Follow up on negative feedback to resolve issues before the customer churns and spreads the word. Negative experiences can often turn into positive ones if resolved in the right way.
Show the customer you are listening to them by following up with actions you have taken based on the feedback they have taken the time to leave.
Design Your Survey to Gather Feedback at Every Touchpoint
Customer journeys can change on a dime and the only guarantee is that today’s journey looks nothing like yesterday’s—and tomorrow’s will certainly be something new. That’s why survey builders need to consider how to gather feedback at every touchpoint in real time.
Journey mapping workshops help you predict and plan for changes in customer behavior, so while your competitors are scrambling to adapt, you’re prepared to meet the evolving needs of the market. This approach has strong grounding in behavioral science and promotes a focus on the memorable moments within an experience that drive perception and behaviors.
InMoment’s Touchpoint Impact Mapping is an innovative way of understanding the moments that matter to customers. It is unique because it is based entirely on comment data drawn from customer feedback, ensuring a more accurate view of the customer’s memory of their experience. This creates an emotional picture of the journey that highlights what is most important to customers and also allows our clients to prioritize those moments that matter most to their customers.
Watch the video below to learn how banking giant Virgin Money leverages Touchpoint Impact Mapping to optimize the customer journey at key points:
How InMoment’s Active Listening Studio Can Help You Become an Expert Survey Builder
InMoment’s Active Listening Studio is a one of a kind listening suite that gives survey builders the control to gather feedback at every touchpoint, allowing customers to tell you what matters most to them without bombarding them with survey after survey. Active Listening Studio includes:
DIY Survey Creation
Our AI-powered Engagement Engine™
The Rapid Resolution Engine™
Our Eligibility Engine™
Social Monitoring
Multimedia Feedback
Leveraging these tools allows you to create a more effective targeted survey, optimize your listening strategy, and ultimately prove that you’ve improved experiences and your business. One of our global retail clients was even able to increase survey response rates by 37% and response length by 38%!
With an intuitive interface, InMoment’s DIY Survey Creation allows you to actively listen to what your customers, employees, markets, and users are saying. Paired with InMoment’s patented, AI-powered Engagement Engine™, rich conversations are encouraged by listening and responding to customers in real time, eliciting not only more, but more valuable responses.
DIY Surveys are a great way for brands to create and design unique surveys that engage targeted audiences through a multichannel approach. With InMoment’s survey builder tools, you are able to choose from best practice templates or create your own custom survey to match your particular brand standard needs. Plus, you can leverage in-app reporting where you can analyze response and completion rates and review survey performance seamlessly and with ease.
Engage your audience at the right time to gain critical insights that will help you move your organization from experience monitoring to experience transformation. Whether you’re deploying your survey through multiple channels of distribution (like URL links, QR Codes or email), using our Invitation Management tool ensures the right surveys reach your desired target audience to collect feedback that drives Experience Improvement efforts in the moments that matter.
Want to learn more about how InMoment can help you conduct a better targeted survey—and improve your customer experiences, employee experiences, and beyond? Contact our team today and we’d be happy to explore the right options for your business!
Digital experience trends are the new road maps of modern day business. Are you still using a paper map to direct you when you’re driving to work? Of course not, you’re using your smartphone that tells you where you are, when to turn, and if there is an accident up ahead.
Think of digital experience trends being the new maps application in your business. You aren’t waiting until the end of the year to get a mailed report containing consumer trends for the past year (hopefully), but rather you need to be keeping up with your consumers in real time. Identifying digital experience trends will help you adapt your business to get ahead of your consumer, not behind them.
It’s no understatement that you—along with every other business for that matter—are operating completely differently than you did in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way that businesses, well, do business. It has also changed the way that your customers interact with you.
Whether it be a customer, prospect, or non-buyer, every piece of the customer journey looks differently today than it did before the pandemic, particularly when it comes to the digital experience. Businesses have been forced into being digital-first. If you didn’t already have a digital presence, you were forced to adopt one, seemingly overnight. And post-COVID, if you haven’t already built a digital experience strategy, we hate to break it to you, but you’re already behind the buck.
Today’s customers aren’t going to be wooed by you just having digital options—they want you to supply truly innovative digital experiences. In other words, you don’t want to follow the digital experience trends, you want to be able to create them so your customers follow you. To help you out, our experts have pulled together a plan to help you mine the data that is going to help you uncover, and take advantage of new digital trends. Tune in below!
3 Steps to Start the Next Digital Experience Trend
Build a Strong Foundation with Integrated Experience
Strategize New Customer, Employee, & Non-Buyer Signals
Don’t Settle for Snapshots—Aim for Actionable Intelligence
Step #1: Build a Strong Foundation with an Integrated CX Approach
Your customers are talking about your business across multiple different channels. Whether it be directly to you (via surveys) or indirectly (through review sites, social media, and the like), your customers are creating signals throughout their journey. However, most CX platforms are still primarily focused on surveys and traditional metrics (in blue in the figure below).
In order to be successful, it is important to have a CX vendor that enables you to do more than take a traditional approach to feedback. We refer to our modern approach to experience as an Integrated CX approach.
As you can see in the figure below, Integrated CX takes into account all the new signals customers are sending and houses them in one place, the InMoment XI Platform. Having a central location for all your customer data helps create a clearer, more consistent picture of the customer journey, empowering you to make more informed, data-backed business decisions in the future.
Step #2: Strategize New Customer, Employee, & Non-Buyer Signals
Gathering data in today’s business environment is easier than ever before. But, the challenge lies in gathering data and linking it to meaningful business KPIs such as customer loyalty, customer acquisition, or generally proving program ROI.
Below, you can see a graphic that illustrates the different feedback signals available today, and how they can be funneled into the XI Platform, then, leveraging the expertise of our Strategic Services Team and AI-Driven technology, you can go from just tracking metrics and scoreboard watching to using that data to uncover actionable insights that create meaningful improvement.
Step #3: Don’t Settle for Snapshots—Aim for Actionable Intelligence
When you export data out of a platform to analyze it, it is already somewhat outdated. Especially when considering the rapid evolution of social-based interactions, even data from the previous quarter might not accurately reflect how your customers are behaving.
In order to get a better understanding of how your customers work, what they are looking for, and what the next digital trend might be, you need to be getting your data in real time in order to keep up with the fast-paced digital landscape and start the next digital experience trend.
Sounds like a fairytale? Well, to prove to you that it’s possible to have always-on, real-time insights, we leveraged the XI Platform to pull over 120,000 data points across the retail industry over the course of seven days using InMoment’s Integrated CX approach. From this data, we unearthed the following three actionable insights that you can use going forward:
1 of 3 emerging customers are more likely to interact with you through social signals, than traditional surveys
60% of those customers have purchased/adopted a new product or offering via a social signal
1 of 2 customers are likely to select a brand that offers a “one-stop” solution, with additional incentives and features (such as buy now, pay later)
Once you have these insights, you are able to empower teams across your business to make informed business decisions and implement customer-pleasing digital experience trends. And once you act on the intelligence, you’ll be able to point back to your experience program as the catalyst to success.
Thinking Outside the Survey
Don’t feel pressured to do things the way they have always been done. As a matter of fact, if the history of social channels have shown us anything, it’s that you need to be willing to try something different in order to succeed.
You’ll never fully understand your customers by just sending them surveys. But, if you interact with them through various social channels, you may be able to get a clearer picture of who they are, and what they want from you.
Want to learn more about understanding your customers, and how to kickstart the next digital trend? Watch the full presentation here!
Welcome to the XI Café Podcast! In order to continue Experience Improvement, the XI Café Podcast was created so that CX program owners around the world could join the conversation and learn from global businesses and industry experts about the latest experience improvement innovations in technology and research services, industry and market expertise, and customer (CX) and employee (EX) engagement best practices.
In the first episode of the XI Café Podcast we’re talking to legalsuper’s CX Insights and Service Design Lead, Eslam Afifi. Eslam is a PhD & CCXP Certified Customer Experience (CX) lead with a proven record of designing and delivering CX programs across different sectors such as Financial Services, Government, Tourism, Oil and FMCG in Australia, Africa and Asia. His journey at legalsuper is worth talking about – we’ll hear how his team has leveraged customer data and insights to transform legalsuper’s operating model, affecting positive change for the business and its members.
Where to Find the XI Café Podcast
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music, but if you are eager to jump right in then you can click the play button below to start listening to this week’s episode!
More of a visual person? No worries. You can also find the video recordings off the XI Café Podcast on our YouTube channel!
My name is Ton Luijten, Customer Success Director + Data Science Lead in APAC—and in this post I’ll help you unlock a new take on ROI—through failure demand.
When we manage client programs at InMoment, return on investment (ROI) is always top of mind. We strongly believe this should be a top priority for any team trying to improve customer or employee experiences to show that they are positively contributing to the financial outcomes of their business.
Most people will instinctively believe that by improving experiences we will improve retention, reduce customer churn, and lower business costs, but proving this is the hardest and most important part of proving your experience program is actually moving the needle at your organization.
Let’s take a look at how considering failure demand can help you prove ROI.
First Up, What Is Failure Demand?
Failure demand is when an organization falls short of servicing customers on the channels they are seeking, which then causes demand for services in other channels.
A classic example is a customer that wants to find information on a brand’s website, but they fail to find the information they need—this usually ends up with a call to the call center.
Why Is Failure Demand Such a Fail?
Failure demand is problematic for brands as it means the customer experience is not optimized and the customer cannot get the service where and when they want it—not to mention, there’s a cost to the organization to service this additional demand.
By reducing failure demand, brands have an opportunity to both improve the customer experience, but also create positive financial outcomes for the organization.
Where Do We Start When Reducing Failure Demand?
To reduce failure demand, we first need to measure it. Ideally you would be able to use operational data for this, but there are a few problems with this method. If we revisit the earlier example—how does the organization measure that the customer visited the website before they called into the call center? If the customer mentioned this on the call, the agent could take a note of this for their file, but we know these notes are typically inconsistent and hard to analyze at scale.
When I work with clients at InMoment, we’ve built custom text analytics sets to analyze call center notes—all with the hopes of understanding what customers are calling about. Then, brands can identify topics that attract large call volumes and work out which ones have the potential to be moved to cheaper channels (most likely online). While this is really exciting work, it does take an investment of time and money.
Another option for monitoring failure demand is to use web intercept technology with session recording to understand which journeys across the website cause the most dissatisfaction.
However, with this option we’re already going into the space of asking customers for their feedback and not just relying on operational data. It also doesn’t allow us to find out what customers did after the failed journey, so limits our visibility on the impact on other channels.
So, What Can We Do To Reduce Failure Demand?
I’m proposing an alternative option that’s simpler and leverages a solution that most organizations already have in place—post interaction surveys. These four questions will give you the information you need to measure failure demand and prioritize areas for improvement.
Here are the questions to ask in your post-interaction survey:
Question #1: Was Your Issue Resolved?
Most CX professionals won’t be surprised by this question as post interaction surveys typically include something of this nature. It’s particularly important for measuring failure demand because you don’t want to cause repeat calls. Of course, it’s also a poor experience for the customer.
Question #2: How Many Times Have You Contacted Us to Resolve That Issue?
It’s important to ask this when measuring failure demand because we want to avoid repeat calls and try to close out issues as quickly as we can.
Question #3: What Channels Did You Use to Resolve This Issue?
This is a multiple choice question, so customers can select all the channels they have used. This is really important as it allows us to understand which channels they used and how many they used. The latter is critical for failure demand.
Question #4: What Is Your Preferred Channel to Resolve This Issue?
The list of answer options is dependent on the selection made at the previous question. By combining this question with the previous one, you can figure out which channels the customer has actually used and which one they would have preferred to use. This insight allows you to prioritise which improvements you need to implement for the different channels and reduce failure demand, as you will be able to resolve customers’ issues via their preferred channel, which means they no longer need to use multiple channels.
Wrapping Up
Of course, these four questions are contingent on the organization understanding what the original issue is. If we don’t have that information, we should also work that question into the post-interaction survey.
By combining all this information, your brand will have the magic formula—you’ll be able to understand the current state of failure demand, identify key areas for improvement to take action, and measure progress over time.
After you do a study or research, you will probably want to know if the results you got mean anything. More specifically, you want to know if there are statistically significant differences between the groups you studied. After all, statistically significant results help you know that what you studied—the variables you chose—are having an impact on the results.
For example, let’s say you did research on your customer base, and you wanted to determine if certain age groups bought your product more than others. Once you have your data, you need to determine if there’s any statistically significant difference between the age groups. How do you do that?
One way to determine if there are statistical differences between groups is to do an analysis of variance also called ANOVA. What is analysis of variance? Read on to learn more about ANOVA tests and how to use them for your own analyses.
What Is Analysis of Variance?
Analysis of variance or ANOVA is a statistical test developed by Ronald Fisher in 1918, and it’s been used by statisticians and researchers ever since. The analysis of variance test is a way to compare means from different groups and determine if the differences in those means are statistically significant. If they’re statistically significant, that means the variable for that group is having an impact on what you’re researching. If they’re not statistically significant, then your variables aren’t affecting what you’re studying.
Let’s revisit the example from earlier. You wanted to determine whether 18–24 years old, 25–35 years old, or 36–45 years old buy your products more. You gather all of your data about how much people are buying based on a random sampling. You determine the mean for each age group on product purchases. ANOVA is then how you can determine if there’s a statistically significant difference between those means.
An analysis of variance test will take into account the sample size and differences between means to give you an F value. The F value can then be analyzed to give you a probability or P value—or the probability that there’s a statistically significant difference. Let’s say you get a P value of 0.03. That would mean your results are statistically significant, and you can reject the null hypothesis. Most likely, that would mean you can determine that age is a significant variable in who buys your product, and you could consider making marketing decisions based on that. That’s the power of ANOVA.
How Does ANOVA Help?
At the core of it all, ANOVA helps you determine what variables have statistical differences and what variables are important to look at in more depth. Even more importantly, ANOVA can give you a glimpse into the motivation behind behavior. What’s driving customers to click on a link? ANOVA might help you determine that. Essentially, ANOVA helps by giving meaning to numbers, direction to actions.
Types of ANOVA
ANOVA is a broad category for several types of tests. The big two to discuss are one-way and two-way ANOVA tests. A one-way ANOVA test is the simplest form of ANOVA. For this test, you’ll need one independent variable and two or more levels. For example, you could use the months of the year as levels but still only test one variable. Two-way ANOVA or full factorial ANOVA is when you have two or more independent variables to test. Two-way ANOVA measures independent variables against each other and if independent variables affect each other.
There are a couple of other types of ANOVA to consider:
Welch’s F Test ANOVA. The Welch’s F Test doesn’t assume the variances between groups are equal, which can be beneficial for some data sets. This type of unranked ANOVA test works when there are two assumptions that are true about the data:
The sample size is 10 times greater than the calculation group (satisfying the Central Limit Theorem)
There are few or not outliers in the data distribution
Ranked ANOVA. If these assumptions above don’t hold, you can instead use a ranked ANOVA test. Ranked ANOVA tests can hold up against outliers and non-normal distributions because the values are replaced with a rank ordering.
Games-Howell Pairwise Test. This ANOVA test doesn’t work with the assumption that variations between distributions are equal, and it’s a test when there’s a higher likelihood of finding statistically significant results.
ANOVA Terms to Know
There are some important terms to be familiar with to work with an analysis of variance test. Here’s ANOVA terminology that may be important for you:
Independent variable. This is the variable that you choose to change, and you’re studying how it will affect the dependent variable.
Dependent variable. Variables that don’t change and are instead affected by the independent variable.
The null hypothesis. When you do an analysis of variance, you will have a pair of hypotheses. The null hypothesis will be the one that says there is no difference between the groups you’re looking at. If your p value is less than 0.05, you can reject the null. If not, you fail to reject the null hypothesis.
The alternative hypothesis. Your other hypothesis is that there is a difference between the groups.
The Formula for Analysis of Variance
The formula for ANOVA is F = MST/MSE. That may look simple, but it involves a few more numbers. The MST is your total sum of squares (all of your means put through a formula) divided by the population total minus one. That gives you the top value for the ANOVA formula. MSE is your sum of squares with error divided by the number of observations minus one. Once you have both variables, you divide the MST by the MSE, and that gives you the F value. With your F value, you can use an ANOVA chart to determine the p value, which will tell you if you can reject the null hypothesis or if you fail to reject the null hypothesis.
How to Run an ANOVA
That formula can get tricky when a lot of numbers are involved, so not every statistician, researcher, or analyst does ANOVA by hand—though it can be calculated by hand, thanks to creation before computer programs. Instead, most researchers use computer software and programming to perform the test. R, Stata, SPSS, and Minitab are great choices for running an ANOVA test accurately and quickly.
Drawbacks to an Analysis of Variance Test
An ANOVA test will tell you that there is a difference between means and if that’s statistically significant. But ANOVA won’t tell you where that difference lies. For example, let’s return to our earlier example. You’re testing three age groups for your product purchases. The ANOVA test will tell you that age is statistically significant, but it won’t tell you which group is the one with the biggest difference. You’ll need to do additional statistical tests to determine which age group is most interested in your product.
Analysis Is Easy with InMoment
Statistical tests can be overwhelming, including ANOVA. While it’s always possible to do an analysis of variance on your own, it’s usually easier and more accurate with some support. InMoment is here to help. Whether you’re conducting a survey, research, or analysis of variance, the process just got a lot easier with InMoment. Book your demo today and see how you can simplify your processes.
In our recent blog, we discussed how you can improve your customer experience (CX) strategy in five simple steps. Customer experience often relates to the long-term relationship between customers and the companies they do business with. It reflects the summary of experiences at different points along the customer journey—such as considering doing business with a brand, making a purchase and becoming a customer, receiving additional services, having issues resolved, etc—and includes multiple channels: phone, in-person, email, and so on. These various interactions along the customer lifecycle—and, more specifically, those that have the most impact on the business—are what we like to call “Moments That Matter” (MTM) in customer experience.
But are there some moments that matter more than others in the overall customer experience? And if so, how do we assess their importance?
Five Questions to Address
What Are “Moments That Matter?”
How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?
How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?
How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” assessed?
Why Does the Technology You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?
Question #1: What Are “Moments That Matter?”
In the past couple of decades, it has become more clear that consumers are after more than just the “product” they purchase. Their choice to support a brand is more than just rational decision-making; it’s about emotions, too. Today’s organizations realize this; so, they try to continuously improve the way in which they deliver those experiences.
For example, many organizations measure call center experiences as a part of their CX program, which is a smart move. Service and support is a key element that defines customer experience, and it frequently generates memorable moments. But is the call center interaction all that matters for the customer?
“Moments That Matter” are the specific interactions—like a particularly superior or terrible call center experience—that trigger customers’ feelings and leave lasting impressions. These are the specific experiences that stand out more than others and impact the customers’ long-term opinions about the organization overall. Additionally, they can likely lead to a make-or-break decision about their future relationship with the organization.
Question #2: How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?
A key step to identifying the “Moments That Matter” is understanding the customers’ journey throughout their relationship with the organization, from consideration and researching the product or service they need all the way through using said product or service.
Mapping this journey starts with the organization’s knowledge of its key customer touchpoints. Next, customers provide feedback and further input to pinpoints those touchpoints most important to them. They also provide context about their best and worst experiences, wins, and pain points. This mapping helps brands focus on the key “Moments That Matter,” because, in reality, not every touchpoint and every experience is as impactful as others in creating healthy and long-lasting relationships.
Question #3: How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?
After understanding what “Moments That Matter” are, the next step is to measure the brand’s performance at each of those moments. This is typically done using a survey format that first asks customers to evaluate their overall experience with the company. Then, it should ask which MTMs they have experienced and evaluate those they are familiar with. It may also be effective to rate some MTMs on a battery of actional deep-dive attributes.
Question #4: How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” Assessed?
There are two general ways to assess the importance of each MTM:
Ask how important each MTM is (so-called “stated importance”), or
Mathematically derive importance from each MTM’s ratings and the overall experience with the company (“derived importance”).
Derived importance has an advantage in that it does not require additional questions and simply uses respondents’ evaluation of each MTM they experienced. In general, the rating for each MTM is aligned with the overall experience rating, and the MTM that best follows the overall experience rating is therefore the most important. This type of analysis is called “driver analysis.” At InMoment, we use a technique called True Driver Analysis, which surpasses other approaches in quality of results.
Question #5: Why Does the Approach You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?
Different statistical approaches can be used to conduct a driver analysis and assess the importance of each MTM: correlation analysis, regression analysis, structural equation modeling, and partial least squares, to name a few. The results of these approaches, however, may be biased in the presence of a strong relationship among the MTMs themselves (called “multicollinearity”).
For this reason, InMoment uses True Driver Analysis, which is a technique designed specifically to avoid this type of bias and to assess the “true” relative impact of each MTM on an overall outcome metric. As an output of True Driver Analysis, organizations can identify the key Moments That Matter, focus their efforts, and be able to improve customer experience, loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line.
A Visual of InMoment Driver Analysis
With continuous experience improvement being a key enabler of happier customers and long-lasting customer relationships, it is most critical to identify and focus on the Moments That Matter in every experience delivered.
To read more about a proven strategy for continuously improving experiences across your brand in five steps—as well as the brands who have found success with it—check out this article for free today!
Earlier this year, InMoment hosted an XI Forum with two incredible speakers—both of whom run experience programs for franchisees. Steve Grossrieder, CEO of JAX Tyres & Auto, and Jess Gill, Chief Customer Officer for Craveable Brands, know exactly what it takes to keep franchisees inspired, and make sure experience programs stick across the organization.
Here Are Your Questions Answered by the VoF Experts:
Expert #1:Steve Grossrieder, CEO and Managing Director at JAX Tyres & Auto
Q: Your NPS at the franchise level is incredible. How do you train staff in the franchises to instill customer experience in all that they do, maximizing sales?
A: We hold best practice and networking sessions in each region with small groups of franchisees to discuss CX best practice and to show our main pain points and how to implement simple procedures to improve these. We also develop CX action plans for all stores under 75 NPS on a monthly basis which shows their detractor feedback analyzed, how they compare to the network and potential actions based on their individual insights to improve their NPS. Additionally, our service proposition is centered around our JAX inspection report—we focus our franchisees on this proposition to deliver our consumer promise to peace of mind driving and our sales naturally translate from identifying customer vehicle issues through the inspection process which is transparent and customer centric.
Q: How and what do you share with franchisees from a CX scoring perspective, and how frequently?
All franchisees have access to their stores individual CX results including their stores NPS, channel performance, monthly comparison trend (compared to the network), as well as text analytics split by promoter, passive and detractor. They also have a case management section which shows customers who have asked to be contacted showing the JAX SLA time to review and resolve with the aim to retain their customers.
Additionally, we share the monthly CX results via a monthly report and internal newsletter showing the ten highest and ten lowest scoring stores, top complaint trends and insights for that month as well as tips and best practices to implement to ensure a consistent experience across the network. We also have multiple digital screens displaying our CX results throughout head office (updated hourly) and our monthly NPS and a selection of customer feedback is displayed on our website and intranet for consumer and franchisee transparency.
Q: Please share more on how you managed to show a clear link between CX improvement and ROI or sales improvement? It’s often a challenge in many industries.
A: Initially this was a challenge; however we have been able to establish (with historical data) the clear link between a higher than average network NPS and the gross profit that these stores make above the network average. We now have clear examples of stores increasing their NPS and their increase in gross profit follows on with a two to three month lag period. NPS has now become a key gross profit lead indicator which we have demonstrated multiple times across the business and now do it store by store to promote culture change and customer centricity.
Expert #2: : Jess Gill, Chief Customer Officer at Craveable Brands (Oporto, Chicken Treat, Red Rooster)
Q: Which channels does Craveable Brands use to capture customer feedback?
A: We use QR codes, email to loyalty customers, Digital Intercept (an InMoment application on the XI Platform empowering brands to capture real-time data from their website visitors) and customer panels.
Q: How do you win back your customer? How do you capture it? How do you let your customer know that your company is implementing their feedback?
A: We win back customers by training staff (in person) that it is okay to own up to errors and to make them right, running our case management program. As for any feedback for the head office, that gets directed to the right people—for example, we made changes based on feedback to bring back our old nugget recipe, and we went back to each of those customers to let them know.
Q: How do you consider feedback through third party apps such as Menulog, Deliveroo, etc?
A: Craveable Brands’ post-transaction survey asks about delivery partner feedback to feed back to them. The feedback collected by delivery partners remains separate from our VoC program today though we look to integrate to have one view down the track.
