customer experience design

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and providing them with a great experience can lead to increased loyalty, higher satisfaction, and improved brand reputation. It’s simple: every company needs customers, but what happens when there are so many brands to choose from? How can brands stand out? The customer experience (CX) is crucial for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. Great customer experience doesn’t just happen as soon as you send out a survey; it needs to be planned and designed purposefully. 

In this article, we’ll discuss what designing an effective customer experience looks like, what makes it different from user experience and customer service, why it matters, the elements of customer experience design, and how to design a great customer experience from start to finish.

What Is Customer Experience Design? 

To start, what is customer experience? Customer experience is every interaction your customers have with your company at any point. That experience affects how they view your organization and products, as well as their loyalty. Customer experience design is the process of creating the customer experience at all touchpoints, from the initial discovery phase through to the post-purchase phase. It’s what your company does to ensure a positive customer experience across all stages of the customer journey. 

The goal of customer experience design is to create a positive, memorable experience for customers that meets their needs, exceeds their expectations, and strengthens their relationship with the brand. It’s a way to move your customers through their journey while actively working to make that a smooth and easy process. Customer experience design involves a multidisciplinary approach, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and user experience (UX) design.

A great customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer satisfaction, improved brand reputation, increased revenue, and a competitive advantage. So focusing on customer experience design is a way to actively work toward creating that great customer experience and helping your company benefit from it. 

Customer Experience vs. User Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer experience is often confused with other similar terms. While customer experience, user experience, and customer service are related, they are not the same thing and should not be discussed interchangeably. Understanding the differences between these concepts is crucial to creating a great customer experience. So, let’s dive into the differences. 

Customer Experience

The customer experience encompasses the customer’s experience with the overall brand at all touchpoints before and after purchase. It includes all interactions with the brand, including marketing, sales, customer service, and post-purchase interactions. It’s every ad, every social media post or comment, every article that a customer reads, and much more. It’s even walking past your storefront or coming across your website. The goal of customer experience is to create a positive, memorable experience that will ultimately strengthen the relationship between a customer and your brand.

User Experience

User experience (UX) is specific to the experience of navigation, usability, and interface design of a specific product or service. It focuses on the user’s interactions with a product or service, including how easy it is to use, how it looks, and how it feels. Basically, it’s your customer’s experience with your product. 

Customer Service

Customer service is the experience that customers have with your representatives about products or services. It includes interactions with customer service representatives, returns, and warranty claims. Again, customer service is a piece of the larger picture of your customer’s experience with your brand. Good customer service is crucial for creating a great overall customer experience because it helps customers feel valued and supported even after the purchase is complete and when something goes wrong. 

Benefits of a Great Customer Experience Design 

Let’s take a closer look at all of the benefits of dedicating time and effort to designing a great customer experience. A great customer experience design can lead to numerous benefits for your business, including:

Increased Customer Loyalty & Retention

A great customer experience design can create a strong emotional connection between a customer and your brand, leading to increased customer loyalty. Essentially, if your company can develop a real relationship with customers, they will continue to come back again and again. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, recommend your brand to others, and provide positive reviews and feedback. Plus loyal customers are what makes running a business so rewarding. 

Higher Customer Satisfaction

A great customer experience design can lead to higher customer satisfaction, as customers feel that their needs and expectations are being met. Higher customer satisfaction can lead to increased revenue and improved brand reputation. Plus you get the satisfaction of creating something that benefits people. 

Improved Brand Reputation

When you provide a great experience for your customers, they’re going to spread the word. Satisfied customers are more likely to provide positive reviews and feedback, as well as recommend your brand to their friends. So if your customers have a great experience with you, that’s what your company will be known for. 

Increased Revenue

A great customer experience design can lead to increased revenue. It’s a simple formula: satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others. This leads to more revenue for your company. Increased revenue can lead to business growth in the long run and help you have the opportunity to continue to provide excellent products and experiences.

Competitive Advantage

A great customer experience design can provide a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. There are so many brands for everything, but companies that provide a good experience are where people want to go. Customers are more likely to choose a brand that provides a great experience over a brand that does not. So to stand out and be chosen above a competitor, provide a great experience for your customers. 

Elements of Customer Experience Design

Customer experience is so important, but what makes up the process of designing CX? These are the most common elements of customer experience design that are important to consider when crafting an excellent CX. 

User Research

User research is the process of gathering information about customers to better understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. To understand how to provide a good experience for your customers, you need to understand who your customers are, what their problems are, and how to solve them. User research can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and usability testing. 

Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is the process of mapping out the customer’s journey from initial discovery to post-purchase interactions. It’s about knowing where your customers start and what leads them to an eventual purchase. It helps your company understand the customer’s perspective and identify any pain points that might hinder the journey. Journey mapping can be used to create a customer experience that meets the needs of the customer at every touchpoint.

Visual Design and UX

Visual design includes the look and feel of the product or service, including branding, colors, and typography. UX design focuses on the usability and functionality of the product or service, including navigation, information architecture, and interaction design. Visual design and UX design work together to create a seamless, enjoyable customer experience. When visual design and UX are prioritized, your company can create a website and products that are easy to use, meet customer needs, and provide customers with a great experience. 

Designing a Great Customer Experience from Start to Finish

With those elements in mind, let’s look at the steps to designing a great customer experience, from start to finish. 

Discovery Phase

The discovery phase involves identifying customer needs and understanding their behavior and expectations. This phase is when you utilize user research, market research, and analysis of customer data. It’s important to develop a deep understanding of who your customers are, their current journey, their pain points, and any areas for improvement when designing your customer experience. 

Definition Phase

With a clear understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to define what success looks like. The definition phase involves defining goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your customer experience design. The definition phase helps ensure that your customer experience design is aligned with your overall business goals and customer needs.

Design Phase

The design phase involves creating a blueprint for your customer experience. You’ve come up with great ideas for what your customers truly need (hopefully revealed in the discovery phase), and you know what success looks like (thanks to the definition phase), so now you can make a plan for how to get from A to Z. You might prototype, test, and refine the design based on research and goals. The goal of the design phase is to create a customer experience design that works when you put it into action. 

Development Phase

The development phase involves bringing the customer experience design to life. You get to take your blueprint and make it into the actual experience for your customers. This phase can include developing necessary systems, processes, and tools to support the customer experience design. 

Deployment Phase

Once you have a developed plan, you can put it into action. The deployment phase involves launching the customer experience design. This phase can include training employees, communicating with customers, and ensuring that everything is working as intended. Now your customers will get to experience a deepened relationship with your brand. 

Continuous Improvement

Simply executing a plan does not mean that your work is done. The continuous improvement phase involves monitoring, evaluating, and improving your customer experience design. You can seek out customer feedback and make any needed changes. The goal of the continuous improvement phase is to ensure that the customer experience design is always improving and meeting the real needs of your customers.

Design a Great Customer Experience With InMoment

The InMoment XI Platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services that allow businesses to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback in real time. Businesses can use these tools to do necessary research about their customers and to evaluate CX design and work toward continuous improvement. 

InMoment’s solution is also valuable when developing your CX design. InMoment provides businesses with actionable insights that can be used to identify and prioritize areas for improvement, design, and test new customer experiences, and measure the impact of changes on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

In addition to its platform, InMoment offers expert consulting and professional services to help businesses develop and implement effective customer experience strategies that align with their business goals and customer needs. InMoment’s team of experts can provide guidance on user research, journey mapping, visual design, UX design, and more.

Final Thoughts

A great customer experience design is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. In today’s competitive landscape, simply having an exceptional product may no longer be enough to win over customers. By designing a great customer experience, businesses can increase customer loyalty, improve brand reputation, and increase revenue. Designing a great customer experience involves multiple elements, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and UX design—and it is a step-by-step process that includes multiple phases.

By using InMoment’s platform and services, businesses can create a great customer experience that meets the needs of their target audience and aligns with their business goals. InMoment can help businesses stay ahead of the competition by providing real-time feedback and insights that can be used to continuously improve the customer experience. Get started with InMoment to begin designing a great customer experience. 

aegon

At Forrester CX EMEA, we heard from InMoment client Aegon, a Dutch public company for life insurance, pensions, and asset management. The key message throughout the conference was to be bold and ensure that organisations are aligned, focused, and ready for the future. Aegon are certainly delivering on this agenda and are continuing to succeed by connecting people and processes across the entire organisation to achieve shared goals and focus on growth.

Aegon’s ‘Connecting with Customers’ programme is an award winning programme which has delivered spectacular results for the business, colleagues and customers. Using a customer centric approach, Aegon has successfully enabled their teams to receive real-time feedback in order to drive change and as a result, are increasing customer satisfaction and accelerating growth.

Connecting With Customers

The experience programme ‘Connecting with Customers’, is successfully embedding a customer-focused culture throughout the business, underpinned by the strong CX & Insight framework run in partnership with InMoment. The programme reaches all parts of the business through online learning, customer talks, animated games and cartoons, podcasts, skills workshops, topic masterclasses, and more. 

In their Forrester CX EMEA presentation, Aegon explained how their program has resulted in deeper customer understanding and colleague empowerment, which translates into measurably better outcomes for the customer and a healthier business. Keep reading for the top takeaways: 

3 Key Takeaways From the Presentation: 

Takeaway #1: Be BOLD

Set out to create a customer-obsessed culture, and get there! Aegon has taken the Connecting with Customers (CwC) roadshow to all locations and functions in the business. It is a very high profile campaign, an ‘all or nothing’ approach because the business knows the customer must come first. 

The Board Directors have shown their support and CwC manifests in many different forms from a regular podcast to learning and development resources, an audio library of customer calls and customer feedback videos. 

Making VoC a part of the entire business might seem like a bold move, but the effort is worth it. As a CX leader, you need to ensure the whole business is aware that every decision affects the customers’ experience.

Takeaway #2: Break Down Silos

Everybody has a role in serving the customer so be inclusive! Recently, a customer was invited into the Aegon offices where he met all those who had helped him on his retirement journey, both back office and customer facing. This event really brought it home how everyone at Aegon has a unifying purpose, to connect with customers. 

Creating a customer focused culture throughout the entire organisation breaks down barriers and allows for better communication and understanding, and as a result, better customer outcomes.

Takeaway #3: Have Fun

Customers can tell when employees enjoy their role and connect with their purpose. Aegon threw a CwC 2nd birthday party recently with music, discussions, and games. And for the New Year’s quiz, Jenny Ryan from ITV’s “The Chase” was the guest of honour! Connecting EX and CX is massively important and by understanding that employee experience can have a positive impact on customer experience is key to creating a customer centric culture. 

One final point that stands out from successes such as Aegon’s is how vital it is to have an inspirational CX leader with the charisma, vision and drive to elevate customer centricity to new levels. In Iain O’Connor, Head of Customer Experience & Insight, Aegon has one of the best, along with other great CX leaders such as Claire Tidey, CwC Programme Manager.

Want to hear from Iain as he speaks about understanding customers’ expectations? Check out this video!

Customer Experience Strategy

Read a blog by Phil Sager, Expert Partner and Daniel Moellerhenn, Expert Partner, Bain & Company, speakers at the XI Forum in Cologne on June 13 & 14

Reports of record inflation, ongoing labor constraints, rising capital costs, and other macro trends are ongoing and have compounded in unique ways. As in previous cycles of historical uncertainty and downturns, these increased headwinds across the globe mean customers and companies are behaving differently.

So, how can CX leaders and their teams best navigate customer experience in such challenging times?

We’ll explore below how to prioritize customers and strategically use customer experience tools to drive growth for your business and keep on course.

Understand the Landscape

As outlined in Bain’s The New Recession Playbook, a successful approach to strategy during a downturn requires businesses to:

  1. Have a realistic assessment of your company’s starting point. Establish a clear understanding of your current strategic position and financial strength in relation to your peers and competitors. From this viewpoint, you can more easily strategize and weigh the types of risks your company can handle.
  2. Be aware that, historically, downturns provide an opportunity for more dramatic gains and losses. In this moment, it’s vital to follow a decisive strategy, as the consequences will have long-term impacts on your business, talent, and customers. Those with a successful approach can end up stronger than before the downturn.

Take a Human-Centric Approach

How does recession strategy talk translate into CX planning and approach?

Customer experts Phil Sager and Daniel Möllerhenn suggest strategically doubling down on customers & employees. You can strengthen your experience management efforts by understanding your customer segments and taking special action to better serve those populations.

In one segmentation use case, a major Retailer Co leveraged existing capabilities and assigned unique Guest IDs to consistently collect detailed data on customers. They were then able to provide specific coupons and product suggestions, even leveraging life events (i.e. expecting parents, new college students) to provide an ecosystem of products at specific points in those customer journeys.

In another example, a major Asia-Pacific Telecom Co utilized segmentation to align their growth strategy with changing customer needs and, as a result, exceeded revenue goals and cemented their leadership in the industry.

From a recent survey of CX leaders conducted at Bain, we learned that while 61% of respondents have existing segmentation that drives action toward different customer segments, the majority of those same leaders do not use segmentation data strategically to buffer the negative impacts of budget cuts. In less-turbulent times, segmentation provides potential opportunity for growth, but in today’s challenging climate, it’s a necessity to strengthen your position and better connect with your customers.

How can you make better trade-offs using segmentation?

Strategic Use of Customer Segmentation

This demonstrates an important opportunity to strategically use customer segmentation to make informed trade-offs, especially in challenging times, to buffer budget cuts, potential downsizing, and other factors outside of the control of CX teams.

Segmentation will help you zero in on the best ways to provide for and delight your customers and with a tailored approach, lean into specific areas to drive customer retention and customer loyalty to weather the storm, earning growth in the short and long term for your business.

Our experts have compiled actionable ideas below to help companies prioritize customers and strengthen their customer experience strategy:

Provide For Your Customers 

Where can you deliver a stellar customer journey point?

  • Offer unique services on top of products that service the customer’s greater overall need
  • Remove junk / nuisance fees from the equation
  • Understand the emotions of your customers and build responses in kind

Inspire Your Teams

Invest in a culture that empowers teams to continuously improve and work toward a common purpose.

  • Equip your front line employees and customer service representatives (CSRs) with proper product, procedures, and communication for supporting customers in challenging situations
  • Deepen their customer connections / distil a clearer voice of the customer
  • Invest in your current employees to create future leaders
  • If applicable, clarify expectations around hybrid / work-from-home (WFH) models

Activate Your Promoters 

Their customer value increases exponentially over time.

  • Find the right implementation of referral programs to reward promoters and grow your base
  • Provide loyalty programs that enhance customer experiences in a meaningful way
  • Improve communications with customers – timely responses over preferred service channels

Your Customer Experience Strategy Going Forward 

In conclusion, navigating turbulent times requires a human-centric approach that prioritizes customers and employees. Customer segmentation is an effective tool for understanding customer needs and taking action to better serve specific segments. By leveraging segmentation, companies can make informed trade-offs, buffer budget cuts, and drive growth in the short and long term. To strengthen their customer experience strategy, companies should focus on providing stellar customer journeys, inspiring their teams, and activating their promoters. By adopting these strategies, CX leaders can steer their businesses through challenging times and emerge stronger on the other side.

Full Service

When it comes to starting a customer experience (CX) program, the right vendor (and solution) can make all the difference. Choosing the right vendor for your CX program can be a critical decision, as it can have a significant impact on the outcome of your program. The right vendor will not only provide the necessary tools and technology, but also bring valuable expertise and experience to the table. They can help you identify your business’s specific CX needs, develop a tailored plan, and implement it successfully. 

With the right vendor, you can ensure that your CX program delivers the desired results and improves your customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. When it comes to what type of CX solution you want to implement, there are two options to choose from: a full-service program or a self-service program. 

What Is a Full Service CX Solution?

A full-service CX solution refers to a CX partnership where the company that provides the platform manages all aspects of the technology (programming, analysis, change management, etc.)

This brand/CX vendor relationship is services driven, and a brand that purchases this type of solution can expect to have a dedicated team of experienced CX and technology experts to check in with regularly (sometimes as often as every week with additional calls if needed) to help the brand with every aspect of their CX program. A full-service CX vendor will help your team define strategy, implement the technology, train team members, craft surveys, import other customer data, design reporting dashboards, and beyond.  

What Is a Self-Service CX Solution?

A self-service CX vendor refers to a situation in which a person or persons within the purchasing organization are responsible for all aspects of the ongoing technology usage.

A brand purchasing a self-service CX solution can expect to have full control and autonomy in their CX initiatives. There is often a dedicated implementation team, but post implementation, there is more likely to be a helpline or contact the brand can reach out to in case of an error or if they’re in need of help.

Of course, there is a gray area between the two categories. A CX vendor that emphasizes true partnership will emphasize that customer experience is not one size fits all, and will therefore offer a blend of self-service and support-driven options to fit your needs. For example, a vendor may offer DIY survey tools alongside strategic insight sessions. 

Self-Service v. Full Service: How to Determine Which Is Right for You

A full-service program can be a great choice if you’re short on resources or if you want to outsource CX management to an expert team. With a full-service program, you’ll be able to fill in any gaps in resources or skill sets with the considerable expertise your full-service CX vendor has on staff. Your dedicated team will be infinitely familiar with your business, goals, and program.

A full-service CX solution will also help you to drive more long-term strategy for your program. Check-ins will help you to stay accountable to goals, and your vendor will be able to advise you on any challenges, as well as connect you with other CX professionals in your industry. 

On the other hand, a self-service program may be a better option if you have the expertise and resources to accomplish your CX goals in-house. With a self-service program, you can make changes to surveys or other initiatives in the middle of the night if you want to. 

Additionally, self-service programs can be more cost-effective in the long run, since you won’t be paying for the vendor’s management services.

Take Our Quiz and Get Started

Ultimately, the decision between a self-service and full-service CX program depends on a variety of factors, including the size of your organization, your budget, and your technical expertise. 

Click below to take the quiz and find out whether a self-service or full-service CX program is right for your business!

QUIZ

Self-Serve v. Full Service CX Program: How to Determine Which Is Right for You

Looking to choose a CX technology vendor? Here’s the first question you need to ask yourself: are you looking for a self-serve solution or a full-service solution? The answer will determine how much support your team receives, the expertise you have access to, where your team will spend their time, and more! On the fence about what’s right for you? This quiz will help you decide.

Take the Quiz

Small CX Team

Forrester predicts that in the next year, one in five customer experience (CX) programs will disappear, but one in 10 will be stronger than ever. The pressure is on for all CX practitioners—but small CX teams are feeling the heat the most. But just because you have a small team doesn’t mean you can’t make a major impact.

In our over two decades of experience, we’ve worked with many small-but-mighty teams of around one to three people. And though it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you have big obstacles but limited resources, we’re here to tell you success is possible—if you use your time wisely. 

That’s why it’s absolutely crucial to focus on CX strategies that help your organization get the most out of your program. What strategies will support CX success for your small team? Keep on reading to find out!

4 Strategies for Success With a Small CX Team

#1: Focus on Quick Wins

Much like baseball, customer experience is a game of singles. You can’t magically tackle every customer issue at once—especially with limited resources. Instead, you need to understand what most negatively impacts a specific customer journey and focus on solving that problem. Then line ‘em up, and knock ‘em down. 

For example, let’s say that your call center data shows customers frequently complain about the log in experience for their online account. Then you know you need to dig into the call transcripts and other available unstructured data to understand what about that experience is making such a negative impact on your customers. (Get a step-by-step guide on how to do this here.)

#2: Lock In Your Executive Champion

To get your CX program started, you likely needed an executive sponsor. But in order to have long-term impact, you need to maintain their support. 

This may be easier for the 53% of CX practitioners who say their executives want their firm to be a CX leader, but for the other 47% percent, making an exec-friendly business case is everything. Your team will need to craft a compelling story, leverage strong visuals, and prove tangible ROI to really knock it out of the park! 

#3: Sell Your Program Internally 

With your executive sponsor in place, now it’s time to sell the rest of your organization. Realistically, you won’t be able to get every employee to buy-in—that’s why you need to sell your program to key individuals that can help you to take action and influence other team members. 

How? You need to adopt a salesperson approach to your own program. Make it clear to team members in other departments exactly what they can gain from CX insights: optimized processes, access to data that can inform decision making, and wins of their own.

#4: Leverage Your CX Partner

Having a small CX team or even just one CX employee can mean that it’s hard to validate ideas or discuss new ones. In fact, four out of five CX teams will lack critical design, data, and journey skills. And that’s understandable when you have a small team—you can’t be absolutely everything for everyone. 

Luckily, you can lean on your CX partner as an extension of your team, especially if your vendor provides you with dedicated services and team members!

Your Next Steps

Now that you understand the four strategies for success, it’s time to make an actionable plan to turn those strategies into a reality. 

To get you started, we’ve put together a step-by-step checklist for your team. In it, you’ll find a manageable task list that will help you lay a strong foundation for each of these strategies, and there’s even an advanced checklist to take your success even further. 

Start proving the value of your small-but-mighty CX team today and download your CX strategy checklist below!

CHECKLIST

How to Craft a Max-Impact CX Strategy for a Small CX Team

Having a small CX team doesn’t mean you can’t make a big difference. What it does mean is that you have to use your time wisely! Download this checklist for step-by-step instructions on how to realize four strategies designed specifically for CX teams like yours.

Download Checklist

It’s Time to Level Up

For your small CX team, every second counts. You simply don’t have time to waste with a vendor that doesn’t work for you or understand what makes your business different. 

At InMoment, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions or set-and-forget programs. Our award-winning technology is built to integrate into your existing tech stack and align to your business goals. And our expert services? Your dedicated team is with you every step of the way. You are always able to reach out to an expert who is intimately familiar with your program—not merely dial a 1-800 help center.

That’s why InMoment customers give us 4.9/5.0 Stars and a 100 “Would Recommend” User Rating.

Want to learn how InMoment can help you maximize your CX strategy? Let us show you!

Organizational Silos

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) is essential for any organization to remain relevant and successful. However, many businesses struggle to find success with their CX program because of  organizational silos

What Are Organizational Silos?

The term “organizational silos” refers to the condition in which different teams or departments within a company operate in complete isolation from one another. This isolation hinders overall collaboration and the sharing of information and data, making it almost impossible to execute on a business-wide initiative that requires the buy-in from multiple teams across the organization.

How Do Organizational Silos Impact the Customer Experience?

This challenge likely sounds familiar to CX professionals. After all, a successful CX program needs to be able to collect data across channels and touchpoints, pinpoint friction points wherever they exist, and then take swift action.That simply cannot happen with silos in place, and that’s why organizational silos can have such a significant negative impact on the customer experience—they make it essentially impossible to improve experiences. 

Wondering if organizational silos could be at the root of your CX challenges? Today, we’ll explore the symptoms of CX silos within an organization and why breaking them down is crucial for achieving your CX goals. We’ll also provide practical tips and strategies for bridging these silos and fostering a customer-centric culture within your business.

The Symptoms of Organizational Silos

Organizational silos refer to the situation where different teams or departments within a company operate in isolation from one another, hindering collaboration and the sharing of information. This can have a significant impact on the quality of the customer experience delivered by the organization. But how do you know if your company is suffering from silos that are negatively affecting the customer experience? Here are some signs to look out for:

Executive Level:

  • Lack of Organizational Efficiency 
  • Misaligned Resources
  • Competing Organizational Objectives
  • Ineffective Process

CX Specific:

  • Consumer Data Silos
  • Limited Insights
  • Duplicative Efforts
  • Feedback Disarray 

If any of these signs resonate with you, it may be time to take a closer look at the silos within your organization and take steps to break them down. In the next section, we’ll discuss the impact that silos can have on the customer experience and why it’s crucial to address them.

The Negative Impact of Organizational Silos

Silos within an organization can have far-reaching consequences if left unaddressed. The negative impact can be felt across the entire organization, from customers to employees to the bottom line. Here are some potential outcomes of silos:

Customer Churn:

  • When different departments are not aligned on the customer experience, it can lead to a disjointed experience for the customer. This can result in frustration and dissatisfaction, leading to churn and lost revenue.
  • Customers may seek out competitors who can provide a more seamless experience.

Employee Turnover:

  • When teams are working in silos, it can lead to a lack of collaboration and communication, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. This can result in a negative work environment and a lack of motivation among employees.
  • Frustrated employees may look for opportunities elsewhere, resulting in high turnover and the loss of valuable talent.

Excessive Costs:

  • Duplicative efforts and inefficiencies can result in excessive costs, both in terms of time and resources.
  • Teams may be spending time and money on initiatives that are not aligned with company goals or customer needs. This can have a negative impact on the bottom line, with costs eating into profits.

In order to avoid these negative outcomes, it’s essential to address organizational silos and foster a culture of collaboration and communication. 

So, What Is the Prescription for Organizational Silos?

You know the symptoms of organizational silos, and what the negative effects may be. But what are your next steps going to be?

In our over 45 years of experience, we have helped organizations of all sizes break down organizational silos. As a matter of fact, we have developed a 3-step organizational silo treatment plan to help you do just that. 
Join two of InMoment’s brightest minds, VP of Customer Success Will Huffman and Manager of Program Excellence Angela Zieres as they walk you through our 3 step treatment plan that won’t just improve your CX program, but it will also improve your business!  Watch it here!

WORKSHEET

Discover Your Customer Experience

 A Guided Exercise to Help You Understand the Current State of CX at Your Organization

So, you’ve been charged with leading a company-wide CX initiative. But where do you even start? Likely, customer experience efforts are already being made in different pockets of your organization, but it’s up to you to break down the silos and connect the dots. This worksheet will guide you through an exercise to do just that!

Download Worksheet

Q2 Product Enhancements

InMoment announced today new innovative capabilities in the award-winning XI Platform for clients around the globe. This release of enhancements builds on InMoment’s integrated CX approach and AI-powered product foundation to give organizations the best chance of competing in today’s changing business environment.

Below you’ll find the latest innovations to: 

  • Summarize customer feedback more effectively to save time and resources
  • Improve the closed-loop service experience to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value
  • Infuse feedback into enterprise systems to save time and resource expense
  • Elevate your CX programs and the teams that drive them to create program efficiency and a quicker time to value

“We’re proud of our innovative and aggressive product cadence to deliver innovation and product enhancements into the market regularly,” said Sandeep Garg, Chief Product Officer at InMoment. “We believe it is important to continually enhance products alongside introducing new innovative solutions that benefit our clients and the goals they are trying to achieve to improve their customers’ experiences.”

If you’re a client and want to talk to someone about the updates to the XI Platform, contact your account rep. If you simply want to learn more about our innovative products and services, a representative can answer your questions by completing the form below, and we’ll get right back to you.

Product Enhancements to Increase the Business Value of CX Initiatives Include the Ability to:

Summarize Customer Feedback More Effectively to Drive Focused Action

First-of-its-kind technology–Smart Summary Generator powered by Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technology, intelligently transforms feedback into easily consumable short, structured paragraphs. to surface the most important topics and trends to help organizations take immediate action on their customer feedback. What’s so exciting about this technology is it reduces the time spent analyzing and helps immediately summarize key themes and topics, making it easier for businesses to get to the root cause quickly. Read the press release about this innovation and other exciting AI capabilities that help save a ton of team time and resources by summarizing customer feedback more efficiently. 

Improve the Closed-Loop Service Experience

We’ve made major UI upgrades and introduced additional features to increase the performance of case management systems. Organizations can now also include employee insights that describe the moods of the employee and the customer at the case close (the person who called into the call center and you resolved their issue). There is also the capability to use closed-loop data for reporting alongside operational data to get additional insights about the customer and their experience. This allows teams to use customer case data to dig deeper into segments and geographies, enabling a better understanding of what to take action on to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.

Drive CX Program Engagement by Infusing Feedback into Enterprise Systems 

We often mention integrated CX and the ability to integrate different systems, feedback channels, and key insights that lead to action as key contributors to the success we see our clients have when it comes to understanding their customers. With that in mind, we’ve made major updates to our workflow application to easily export text analytics data and send it directly into BI tools. It allows users, like analysts or researchers, the ability to pivot on data from tags to mine data and find insights that no one else can find in their BI tools of choice. This gives business analysts the flexibility and control over data analysis, which saves time and resource costs by minimizing the need for manual or scripted analysis. This process is critical to helping organizations identify trends and actionable insights more quickly, regardless of the data source or language.

Elevate CX Programs and the Professionals that Drive Them

InMoment and NPSx by Bain & Company have entered an exclusive strategic partnership to continue our efforts in alleviating the angst organizations are having as they struggle to understand where to begin when setting up a CX program or how they can evolve their program’s maturity level. Our joint expertise helps organizations understand how to assess current CX capabilities and how to create and execute successful CX strategies and initiatives to improve program efficiency and quicker time to CX value. NPSx Bain is also an expert in training and certifications with accreditation for CX professionals and practitioners to enhance their expertise around the latest customer experience and NPS prowess or training and certification to stay current with industry best practices, develop new skills, and advance careers. 

These enhancements and more, including 26 new language capabilities added to the platform, have been designed to help our clients summarize and leverage customer feedback more efficiently, identify how to take targeted action on closed-loop feedback, leverage AI to intelligently transform feedback into easily consumable paragraphs to understand themes, and export text analytics to current BI tools. 

To learn more about the latest product innovations and enhancements, you can find additional detail on the web pages linked above or check out the release notes here

Email Survey Subject Lines That Increase Open Rates

Customer experience (CX) surveys are foundational to soliciting the customer feedback you need to power your CX program, and many of these surveys are sent via email. However, the first step to receiving that survey feedback can be one of the most difficult: getting your customer to open your email. 

When it comes to open rates, your email’s subject line is more important than you might think it is. Two helpful email stats drive this point home:

  • 69% of recipients will look only at the subject line before flagging an email as spam.
  • 47% of recipients decide to open an email based only on the subject line.

If you’re trying to figure out all the possible reasons why your survey emails aren’t getting decent open rates, it makes sense to start with your subject lines.

5 Tips to Help You Write Engaging Email Survey Subject Lines

Tip #1: Establish the Right Tone

Effective customer interaction is super dependent on speaking your audience’s language. This doesn’t just refer to the words and terms you use in your emails, even though that is obviously also extremely important.

No, we’re referring to your “voice” here – where you pitch the subject line on the “familiarity” spectrum. On the one side of this spectrum is “ultra conversational,” and on the other side, “ultra professional.”

On the conversational side, you’ll use language that makes your recipients feel like they’re being asked a question by a friend or a trusted colleague. These subject lines should make the recipient feel comfortable because they have an approachable tone.

Here are some examples:

  • “A quick question for you”
  • “Leslie, got a sec? ”

On the professional side of the spectrum, you’re using language that builds trust in your brand’s ability to take your service seriously. You don’t have to come off pompous or like you’ve swallowed a thesaurus. Stick to the point, and treat the recipient like someone who appreciates professionalism in the workplace.

  • “We’d genuinely appreciate feedback on our performance.”
  • “Leslie, how can we make you more productive?”

There are quite a few things to consider when choosing the tone of your survey email subject lines. Your brand image is arguably the most important, but things like recipient demographics and the industry you’re playing in should also play a role.

Building buyer personas is a standard practice in digital marketing. Many successful businesses go through this process to understand exactly who they’re selling to. This data is invaluable when deciding on the tone of your survey email subject lines.

Tip #2: Go Beyond Basic Personalization

According to Campaign Monitor, recipients are 26% more likely to open an email if the subject line has been personalized.

What you use to customize the subject line will obviously depend on the data you have on the customer. Using their name is an obvious starting point. However, you can also reference their most recent purchase if your CRM has logged it. Or a virtual event they attended. A modern CX platform can grab this info and personalize the subject line. 

If you’re online mattress retailer Zoma and you’re sending out a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey email to find out how a support query was handled, if the shipping went well, or if the customer is satisfied with the quality of a recent purchase, you could take one of the following approaches:

  • “How did we do on your support query [#66456]?”
  • “James, how was the webinar with DocuSign?”
  • “How’s that Zoma mattress working out?”

Showing evidence that the email comes from a reputable origin (i.e., the actual company they interacted with) is critical if you want to maximize that open rate.

By using their name and referencing their purchase, you’re landing a one-two punch of credibility and massively increasing the chances of a response.

Tip #3: Talk About Benefits

Let’s be frank here. When you send out a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey email, you’re basically asking an established customer to take time out of their day to reveal their feelings about your brand despite there being no immediate reward in it for them.

But that shouldn’t stop you from letting your recipients know that their feedback will result in long-term benefits for you and them.

Good feedback — both positive and negative — means improved service for everyone. A large number of honest responses will help you get better at designing new product features. Let your recipients know! Make them feel like their voice is important and that it benefits them to be heard.

Here’s an example. If you’re an energy services company like Ecopreneurist, and you’re sending out an NPS survey, you may want to try subject lines like these:

  • “Help us get even better at saving you energy.”
  • “Leslie, your feedback helps us save you money.”

Even though the email content will ask them a typical NPS question like “How likely are you to recommend Ecopreneurist to a friend?” the subject line can illustrate the eventual reward customers will experience by responding.

There’s a genuine correlation between improved service and receiving this type of information from customers. There’s no reason you can’t creatively leverage this relationship to create highly engaging subject lines.

Tip #4: Ask Your Recipients a Question

A good subject line engages the recipient. You’ll want the subject line to make them think and feel something. Trigger their thoughts and their emotions.

A great way to do this is by asking a question. 

The right question can trigger introspection. It can make the recipient think about something they want to share with you.

A SaaS company like ShowMojo might employ a customer effort score (CES) survey to help them spot inefficiencies and/or improve in two areas:

  1. Onboarding. Good onboarding helps ensure “trial subscribers” see the product’s value and eventually become paying customers, and it’s a critical step in maximizing a subscriber’s lifetime value (LTV).
  2. Product features. A CES survey can gauge how easily customers are adopting a new product feature and help you optimize for improved adoption. 

In both cases, positioning the survey in question form is a great way to maximize open rates. For example:

  • “How hard was the migration to ShowMojo?”
  • “How easy was it to create a new rental dashboard?”

You can see in the above examples that the subject lines don’t even mention the survey. The two questions are directed at the customer and their experience. 

Tip #5: Keep It Simple and Short

You should keep your survey email subject lines to under 50 characters to be sure everyone sees it. The number of people opening emails using their mobile phones is increasing every year. And the limited amount of real estate on a mobile device means that subject lines are often truncated.

Yes, it’s hard to make a compelling case for someone to open an unsolicited email using so few words, so take your time writing. Constantly try whittling the number of characters and words down to an absolute minimum without compromising your core message.

Let’s take a look at some concise and effective customer survey subject line examples:

  • “Are we doing a good job, Leslie?”
  • “Where can we improve?”
  • “We’re always looking for honest feedback.”
  • “Give it to us straight; we can take it.”

A Quick Word on Open Rate Benchmarks

What kind of open rates should you expect from your survey emails? Having a sense of benchmarks is critical if you intend to measure how effective your new subject lines are. 

According to our customers’ results, an open rate over 20% is solid, with only a small number of emails achieving a 30% open rate. If you see this level of engagement, you’re probably doing multiple things right. If it’s below this figure, realize there’s room for improvement and review your subject line copy against our recommendations.

Some Final Thoughts

Regardless of what industry you’re operating in, certain best practices will always be relevant when crafting email subject lines.

Here’s a summary of the most important things to bear in mind (along with a fifth bonus tip):

  • Personalize as much as possible.
  • Tell recipients about the benefits of completing the survey.
  • Ask a question.
  • Keep it short and to the point.
  • Try to keep your subject lines under 50 characters.
  • Avoid spammy words like “opportunity,” “offer,” “cash,” “discount,” or “click here.”

There’s little point in rethinking your subject line strategy if you’re not backing up your efforts with data on the success or failure of a new approach.

You’ll want to A/B test your survey emails. A simple way to do this is:

  1. Split your email recipients into two groups (Group A and Group B). 
  2. Target Group A with subject line A. “Welcome! How was the sign-up process?
  3. Target Group B with subject line B. “Answer one question and help us improve.”
  4. Measure each email’s open rate. If Group A gets a higher open, a post-onboarding greeting works well for your new customers.

By A/B testing your email subject lines over time, you gain valuable knowledge about the subject lines that resonate with your customer base. Not only will that information help you with your specific survey, but it can also help other CX-focused teams optimize their customer communications as well.

Want to learn more about best practices for surveys? Check out this white paper from the experts! And if you want to learn more about how you can listen to your customers not only via surveys, but by leveraging data from social media, online reviews, and more, let’s chat!

In March, I spoke at InMoment’s XI Forum Sydney, and it shouldn’t surprise you that I chose to talk about building a customer experience (CX) program! In the spirit of sharing insights for those who couldn’t attend or want to revisit my key points, I’m here on the InMoment blog to briefly recap my presentation!

When I started working at InMoment, I knew nothing about CX. I didn’t know what a closed-loop system was and certainly didn’t know the difference between the inner and outer loop.

So at the recommendation of my supervisor, I read two books that you’re probably familiar with: The Ultimate Question 2.0 and Outside In.

I started to understand customer experience. NPS made sense. The case studies in the books made sense. And using customer experience to drive business outcomes felt common sense.

However, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that our leadership team asked me to lead the effort to rethink and revamp our CX program: Elevate. Here’s my story of going from a CX newbie to turning Elevate into an award-winning program in 365 days. And I entirely attribute it to the three tips below!

In the post below, I’ll cover these three practical, simple, and impactful tips to turn your CX efforts into award-winning programs.

Tip #1: Stop Doing Things That Don’t Work

My first tip is “stop doing things that don’t work.” While you likely know what’s not working in your program, here are some red flags: low response rates, high drop-off rates, homogenous responses (i.e., only hearing from one type of customer), or a lack of actionable insights. Sometimes surveys are not the proper listening methodology for a given touchpoint.

Here’s an example:

Previously, we sent a post-sales survey to buyers after our sales team closed a deal. This is a critical touchpoint to understanding the buying process and competitive landscape. However, we received fewer than 20 responses from hundreds of invites yearly.

Everyone knows the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” right? Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then in the world of CX, a customer conversation is worth a thousand surveys. As companies move toward more automated, impersonal interactions, I’d argue that live customer interviews are more important than ever.

So, instead of trying to increase survey response rate, we realized we were using the wrong listening method at this key touchpoint. We scraped the after-sales survey completely and doubled down on doing live Buyer Interviews.

We found that many customers would rather spend 30 minutes live on Zoom with us than two minutes completing a survey. We upload our interview transcripts and summaries to our XI platform for tagging and analysis—and the insights are invaluable.

Maybe you can’t conduct customer interviews, but I bet you have existing customer conversations in the form of call and chat transcripts, social reviews, or email support.

If something’s not working, try something new! Although there are best practices in CX, you know your business and your customers best. You need to do what works for you.

Tip #2: Listen With Purpose

No CX leader intends to ignore customer feedback. But too often, we launch surveys—or other customer listening posts—without purpose. Every customer feedback data source should have a clearly defined purpose, owner, and governance (i.e., a way to analyze the data, identify insights, and take action based on the themes).

Otherwise, customer feedback goes into a bottomless pit… and eventually, you’ll stop receiving it.

Sandeep Garg, our Chief Product Officer, is the most customer-centric product leader I have ever worked with. He is committed to ensuring the InMoment solution works for every single customer and that we continue to innovate to meet the emerging needs of our customers. And there’s no better way to achieve that than through customer feedback.

Sandeep and his team receive and review every piece of customer feedback, whether it’s a survey from our current customers, in-platform user feedback, or the Buyer Interviews I mentioned previously. He cares deeply about every nuance of the platform and ensuring it meets customer needs.

Here’s an example:

On February 1st, we received feedback from a customer. They were mostly happy, but the feedback contained a specific qualm about the platform. Sandeep received and triaged the feedback; by the next day, his team had resolved the issue for the customer.

The response from the customer: I wish I had given feedback sooner!

That’s what listening with purpose looks like. And when customers know you’re not only listening but taking immediate action, they’re more likely to give feedback repeatedly!

Tip #3: Always Be Celebrating

I saved my final topic for last: celebrating employees, as I call it, “Always Be Celebrating.”

Our Relationship survey asks, “Has any individual or team at InMoment gone above and beyond to ensure your success?” When we were revamping the Elevate Relationship survey, I knew I wanted to include this question, but I had no idea how much of an impact it would have.

We call this “Above & Beyond,” and it’s become a key metric for account health, customer satisfaction, and employee performance. We know that when an Above & Beyond employee is recognized, NPS is 5x higher. So while we’re primarily a technology company, our customer-centricity drives loyalty and continued value.

Whenever a customer calls out an individual, we pipe that comment into Slack and tag the employee. We also recognize Above & Beyond employees at:

  • Company All-Hands Meetings
  • Weekly Company Emails
  • Moments Boards in Conference Rooms
  • Our Mobile Application

Through this process, we’ve also identified the DNA of Above & Beyond employees, which we use for hiring, coaching, and training. And all of this results in highly effective employees that know how to meet customer needs!

Wrapping Up

Taking your experience program from the early stages to “award-winning” doesn’t have to be complex or require massive investment. Simply reframe your mindset and implement these three practical tips to build a program that customers, employees, and even executives love.

Stress Awareness Month

Did you know that April is Stress Awareness Month? Merriam-Webster defines stress as “a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.” And looking at the world around us, there are many elements that could lead to immense feelings of stress. 

Rather than rattling off a list of possible stressors, we want to talk about how you and your employees can manage these feelings year round with practical, accessible tools and coping strategies. So without further ado, let’s get zen!

3 Tools to Share with Employees for Stress Awareness Month

Tool #1: Leverage Company Mental Health Resources

Mental health is just as important and physical health. And just as they provide medical benefits to help provide for their physical health, many businesses today are also making mental health resources available to employees.

If you are on your company’s human resources team, it might be worth reiterating available resources to your employees via email or your company’s internal communications channels (especially since it’s Stress Awareness Month). This communication should also feature clear instructions on how to access those resources to increase accessibility. Having those resources is only helpful if your employees are aware of and using them!

Tool #2: Create Space with Meditation

Stress can create feelings of helplessness, decrease ability to focus, and stir up racing, negative thoughts. To combat this, encourage employees to create mental space with meditation. 

Meditation will look different for everyone, but the goal is to “focus your attention and eliminate the stream of jumbled thoughts that may be crowding your mind and causing stress.” One common method is to sit quietly and focus solely on your breath for at least two minutes. If you get distracted, that’s okay! Just refocus your attention on your breath.

There are also apps and websites that provide guided meditations and tools to help achieve a meditative state. At InMoment, we provide our team members with access to an app called Sanvello, a mental health app that supports people through self care, peer support, coaching, and therapy. One of the tools available on Sanvello is guided meditations.

“We are so happy to give our InMoment Team access to Sanvello, a mental health app that focuses on the importance of checking in with yourself,” said an InMoment HR representative. “Employees will be able to leverage the app to access self care tools like daily mood tracking, guided journeys, coping tools like meditation, and more to help them manage stress in a world full of noise. This is a wonderful step to support our team both inside and outside of the workplace.”

In addition to apps like Sanvello, you can also find free guided meditations on Youtube and other sites. These resources can be communicated via the same method we mentioned in tool number one.

Tool #3: Plan for Moments That Matter

At InMoment, we have this saying: “Own the Moments That Matter.” And though this is applicable for improving experiences for customers and employees, we also mean that it’s important to really be present in the moments that matter most to you personally. 

We each have our own “moments that matter,” whether it’s going on a walk with our dog, taking an exercise class, spending quality time with our family and friends… the list goes on! In these stressful times, it’s more important than ever that we are deliberate about setting time aside for the things that make us feel our best. 

At the beginning of each week, set aside time in your schedule to do something for yourself, and encourage your employees to do that too! It can be something as simple as taking 20 minutes to get up from your desk to stretch, or you could even utilize your paid time off to have an extended weekend. Whatever it is, we each need to take the time to create (and own) our own moments that matter.

Encouraging a Self-Care Culture

It’s simple: companies are most successful when their employees are successful—and this stretches beyond professional success. To be their best at work, employees need to know that their employers encourage them to do what they need to in order to thrive. That means companies must clearly communicate about mental health resources and provide the tools necessary to assist their employees year round—not only during Stress Awareness Month. Doing so clearly displays employee commitment, and will lead to cultural and business success long term.

What is employee commitment? And how can brands demonstrate that? Learn all about it from InMoment employee experience experts here.

B2B Customer Experience

One of the best ways to overcome obstacles is to fall back on your community and brainstorm solutions together. That’s why InMoment hosts regular Experience Exchanges to help customer experience (CX) professionals do just that. 

InMoment XI Strategist Jim Katzman had the opportunity to sit down with Peggy Carrieres, Global Vice President of Sales Enablement and Supplier Development for Avnet and electronics components-industry expert. 

In the conversation, she offered insight into how B2B brands can create transparency, combat supply chain challenges, redefine “customer loyalty,” and drive trust for customers who face an increasingly complex supply chain in one of the most volatile market cycles in recent history.

Our Conversation with Peggy Carrieres of Avnet

Jim: Great to see you again, Peggy! I’d like to start the conversation about the connection between the supply chain challenges many B2B companies are facing and how these challenges affect loyalty. What role does Experience Improvement play here, and how? 

Peggy: I have been in this industry for over 25 years, and back then, it was all about process-focused engineering and technology—and that’s great. Still, we’ve seen the pervasiveness of electronics, and everything we use—from work to play—is packed with technology to make our lives easier. 

For example, a simple light bulb used to house a filament and now has many semiconductors in it. It’s a huge industry and growing like crazy, but over time, it has gotten incredibly complex.

Our product goes to 40 countries to get to market, and we sit in the middle of the value chain between suppliers and customers. 

We’re a value-added distributor with almost 2K engineers globally who work on designing a journey to help our customers get their products to market in a complex supply chain. But at the end of the day, what we’ve found from our trend data since we started our CX program back in 2014 is that relationships still matter. That is probably the most significant lesson in our voice of the customer journey: relationships can drive so many other factors in your business, and if you miss the boat, you are going to miss your customer. 

Jim: We all know about supply chain challenges, but in the semiconductor industry specifically, can you talk about how or what role agility plays?

Peggy: It’s important to know that this industry, by nature, is cyclical; it ebbs and flows about every four years and is driven by technology.  What we’re seeing today is different and more complex and has permanent changes to initially temporary solutions. Early 2020 COVID-19 hit but didn’t drive the situation yet, but as it became more and more complex, its influence grew. 

Avnet is a broad-line distributor, operating in over 140 countries globally in every region. We are able to move our customer’s demands from one country to another quickly.  So when you put that through a CX lens, I would say in this industry, what we’ve learned is that it’s imperative to understand global and cultural norms and how people get work done on a day-to-day basis in different cultures.

A lot of the hiccups that happen in B2B are due to miscommunication. We’ve learned that being agile through our supply chain means distributors like Avnet become the control tower, creating transparency across the full product lifecycle.  If you think about it, a customer may have 300 suppliers to purchase from to get their product to market. Their demand signal can be diluted, but because we have established relationships with suppliers, we can get the early warning and adjust to be flexible in our supply chain with our clients.  I don’t think this is a temporary standard; it’s going to completely change how we get business done on a daily basis. 

Jim: Would you say Avnet is like a hub for those 300 suppliers? 

Peggy: Absolutely, 100% I do—a global hub! We have customers who’ve engaged with us that haven’t traditionally engaged with “the channel” and who prefer or even try to go direct to the supplier, but the process is so complex it’s just very difficult. They can’t physically manage every supplier and every step of bringing their products to market, so they come to us. 

Jim: Since Avnet is a global company, you have many different cultures to navigate. How do you listen for, understand, and drive action to counter the communication problems you may encounter due to those differences? 

Peggy: That has been one of the most significant values of our voice of customer program. When we started it, we wanted to build a coalition in every country, but every country did its own thing and tracked its own trends over time.

It’s essential to give the feedback to someone who has context and insight into that culture. For example, we have one response that came through in Hebrew, and our translation team couldn’t translate it. So, I took it to someone who is Israeli, who works on our team here in Phoenix, and who knew the context. She relayed that the feedback was such an endearing phrase that no translation can convey its special meaning. 

This experience taught me that we need global understanding and empathy across the organization. However, we also need context in regions and countries that offer nuance because it’s hard to hear those things sometimes. 

We do that in a consultative manner, and by doing that, over time, our teams have been conditioned to get that feedback and use it to drive revenue and benefit, our teams have made that connection, and it has been highly successful. 

Jim: How does customer experience play a role in how Avnet deals with global supply-chain challenges?

Peggy: The market will change—we are seeing signs of it now. Who the customer is can also change over time. We’re the largest revenue-generated AZ-based company, with 45% in Asia, 30% in Europe, and 25% in the US, so we’re well-balanced. But from the perspective of customer experience and relationships, we needed more. 

We did a cross-correlation with NPS and what has the most uplift in “loyalty,” which is a term I hate because it can change quickly depending on how you react and respond. However, the pillars and drivers for us are ease of doing business, the quality of products and services, and, at the end of the day, how we engage with customers matters. 

For instance, how we respond to a customer’s challenge will be remembered when a customer’s partnership is on the line. I am their advocate to our supplier base; being present at the table to show them I care is mission-critical. These relationships are what drive the B2B space. 

Jim: Yes, I learned that when the executive escalation call comes in, you first hit mute and listen for pockets where you can fix something, even if it’s not everything. I think the key is honing your skill of listening to encompass the whole pain point and resisting the urge to jump in immediately at the first sign of distress.

Peggy: Right, and we’ve seen a complete shift in the focus of this industry. Raw materials, labor, and logistics all cost more now, and so we’ve had to change an industry’s discussion.  It used to be from the total cost down to total price, but now it’s the total cost of ownership, which is the assurance of supply and mitigating risk for our client. 

The conversation has shifted, and if we didn’t have a finger on the pulse of the market and work collectively with our customers, we would’ve missed the boat. If you just show a price increase without offering a conversation, you’ve hurt your relationship as well, and you don’t just come back from that. 

Jim: One thing I hear from our clients is that it’s hard to capture the B2B voice. I’d love to hear how you think and process capturing that flavor in your design approach and how Avnet built its relationship survey with the employee experience in mind. 

Peggy: The value of feedback is trends over time, so one thing we do (as we know who our demographics are) is we have the customers self-identify their role in the organization. We’ve got buyers, engineers, executives, and supply chain materials, and because they see the relationship differently at each level, it’s important to know the perspective behind the individual feedback.

I own our design tools and capabilities, and I focused specifically on the feedback from customer engineers. One thing that has been valuable is we ask them in a simple survey if they’d like to opt-in for a focus group, and we’ve had a pretty good response there. This volunteer participation allows us to quickly pose further and more profound questions to that group about what we’re developing at Avnet.  So, I think it’s important to ask customers to self-identify because every company is different in B2B. A supply chain person in one company may be completely different from a supply chain person in another.

Another thing we are seeing is what we call “customer lifecycle convergence,” where the supply chain and design chain are becoming more integrated than ever before, so you have to be in touch with both of those voices if you want to be successful. 

Jim: So, do you have different relationship questions for the different audiences you’ve identified?

Peggy: We actually just did a voice of the engineering survey, and what we found was that 93% said they spent the majority of their time looking for parts and needed someone to help them.  With this, we were able to develop a new design process based on the current state of the market and trained the field application engineers to use that process.  

In return, our revenue, that’s tied to what we call demand creation, has really increased over the last two years. So having that outside-in perspective and then changing the approach and the selling motion had a huge benefit for us.

That’s a Wrap!

This B2B Experience Exchange was packed with valuable insights about the supply chain challenges. Additionally, awesome employee experience insights also packed a powerful punch in this conversation, and we’ll be including those as part two! Look out for our next quarterly experience exchange, and in the meantime, check out this Guide to building a customer-centric B2B  experience.

XI Café Podcast

Welcome back 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 latest episode of the XI Café Podcast, we interviewed Marina Strbac, who leads the Membership Experience Team at the New Zealand Automobile Association (NZAA). Marina is a people-focused, data-informed professional with a passion for customer-centric marketing. 

Here are some of the questions and answers we covered:

Q: What is the structure of the membership experience team at NZAA?

A: Marina leads a small team of four diverse humans from vastly different backgrounds—UX/UI design, math, and marketing all combined together to create optimized experiences for NZAA members. When it came to pitching and embedding an insights-to-action VoC program, the whole team worked together to implement an experience improvement program that would eventually support 1 million+ New Zealanders! 


Q: How did you get the NZAA Voice of Customer Program off the ground and what were the bumps on the way?

A: The team leveraged all their skill sets and adapted as they progressed.

The initiative changed as business circumstances changed. Originally, the team aimed to set up a company-wide VoC program, and eventually, the team pivoted toward a membership-only, journey focused VoC program that was approved by the wider business. Three months later, the program went live! 

Q: You now have a VoC program in place with a large volume of data flowing in. Marketers are somewhat overwhelmed with the vast array of data points already available (website, emails,…) how do you integrate VoC data for marketing purposes?

A: From Marina’s perspective, there’s no need to be overwhelmed by data—instead, ask yourself a few questions. Which insights/data points matter the most? Why do they matter the most? Qualify both of these against your business strategy and business goals. Take your own perception out of it, and instead re-focus on the wider business strategy. 

Once you have the answers, data and insights are pretty straightforward. Measure the baseline of the data points you’re interested in, set up a test and learn matrix, and keep going with reiteration— remove things that don’t work, and keep those that do. Remember that context is important, so do what you can to be data and insight INFORMED, not merely data driven.

In practice, NZAA identified that the “onboarding” member journey was important to track. The team knew engagement was dropping—and with membership retention as a key metric for the business, this was an important challenge to tackle. There were a lot of hypotheses from different people in the business, but ultimately the team needed to understand the “why” behind the onboarding challenge. With that in mind, the team pushed beyond open rates and click through rates, and set key metrics for customer intelligence. NPS, CSAT, and sentiment measures were set and with verbatims on top, understanding the WHY behind engagement drop became easier. Now, the team has the business data overlaid with VoC data, and they can see a fuller picture—they learned it’s a whole lot more complex than the original hypothesis. Through a test-and-learn approach, the membership team is driving optimisations based around justified prioritization.

Q: What was the “aha” moment that made you realise the potential of adding customer data to your marketing decision making process?

A: With 15+ years of experience, and over ten years in direct-to-customer, Marina has always integrated insights into communications and campaigns, and she acknowledges that customer data points at our disposal have evolved. You now need to overlay business data, operational data, and customer insights to get a full picture. The entire business capability needs to be lifted to enable customer centric marketing endeavors. Marketers need propensity models, a well-oiled marketing automation platform, and prioritized test-and-learn matrics just to name a few. As a marketer, you can’t build these alone. 

The aha moments happen when you’re working with other parts of the business, connecting the dots and asking questions like, “is it correlation or causation?” With a focus on customer actions and the passion for creating better experiences, you’ll constantly have those ‘aha’ moments. Curiosity tangents should be encouraged as that is usually where the magic happens.

Q: How are you planning to further grow your VoC program to improve the effectiveness of your marketing?

A: Next up for NZAA is strategic customer journey mapping! The business will identify key pain points and validate these with operational data. Of course, all different business units will have varying opinions, but NZAA will use business and VoC data to validate these. 

Where to Find the XI Café Podcast

You can listen to the podcast on SpotifyAmazon Music, and Apple Podcasts. 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!

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