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!

Consumer Duty- How You Can Prepare

The new FCA Consumer Duty is intended to improve customer outcomes and promote better customer experiences in the financial industry in the United Kingdom (UK) by setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection. By prioritising customer interests and designing products and services that meet their needs, firms can create more positive and beneficial experiences for customers.

What Is Consumer Duty?

Consumer Duty Principle, proposed by FCA, is a significant new legislation for the UK Financial Services sector. The legislation aims to set a consistent and increased standard of care to customers, and mandates organisations to put the needs of the customer first. 

What Are the Details of the New FCA Consumer Duty?

The FCA Consumer Duty has three golden rules that every UK financial organisation will need to adhere to:

  1. Act in Good Faith Towards Customers: Organisations are required to act in the best interests of their customers and prioritise their interests over their own. They must also ensure that their products and services meet the needs of their customers.
  1. Allow and Support Customers to Pursue their Financial Objectives: Organisations must design their products and services to meet the needs of their customers and ensure they are fit for purpose. They must also ensure that their pricing is transparent, fair, and not misleading.
  1. Avoid Causing Foreseeable Harm to Customers: Organisations must provide clear and accessible information to their customers about their products and services, including any risks associated with them. This includes communicating in plain language and avoiding jargon or technical terms that customers may not understand.

How Will the Act Benefit Consumers and Financial Organisations?

If you get it right, our experts at InMoment foresee the Consumer Duty Principle bringing many benefits to consumers and financial organisations alike, such as: 

  • Customer Trust and Loyalty: Putting the customer’s interests first can lead to increased customer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business.
  • Efficiency and Effectiveness: By designing products and services that meet the needs of your customers, you are likely to see increased efficiency and effectiveness in your business operations. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability.
  • Brand Image and Reputation: By promoting responsible business practices and prioritising customer outcomes, you can enhance your company’s reputation as a socially responsible and ethical business.

Consumer Duty + Experience Improvement = Customer Centricity! 

Customer experience (CX) platforms can help financial services organisations comply with the FCA Consumer Duty more effectively by helping them better understand their customers’ needs, improve their products and services, and ensure that they are acting in their customers’ best interests. With an integrated CX approach of leveraging the right data, technology, and CX expertise you can take the right action to comply with Consumer Duty in the following ways:

  • Data Management: Managing customer data more efficiently helps to better understand your customers’ needs and preferences, which is essential to designing products and services that meet those needs.
  • AI-powered Analytics: Analysing customer behaviour and preferences helps you identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to products and services in order to better serve customers.
  • Communication Management: Managing communications with customers more efficiently ensures that they receive clear and accessible information about your products and services and  any concerns or questions can be addressed immediately.
  • Compliance Management: Tracking compliance activities ensures that all customer interactions are recorded and monitored and reported correctly and efficiently. 

Five Ways Financial Organisations Can Prepare for Consumer Duty

To comply with Consumer Duty, better technology, data management, and improving customer experiences will be crucial to the success of every financial organisation in the UK. At the onset and in the future, it will be necessary to make experiences, compliance, and reporting processes more efficient. Here’s a few ways InMoment ca help you to prepare and ensure your organisation is set up for success.  

#1: Proactively Detect Consumer Intent to Complain

Ensure you respond to complaints. Simplify the process by applying a tool that automatically identifies and alerts you to those customers who intend to complain or even switch providers. Using InMoments AI-powered technology, those customers who intend to complain, but have not yet done so, can be flagged, with a formal case raised to resolve their issue, avoiding a formal complaint and potential fine.

#2: Comprehensive Review and Audit of Survey and Listening Posts

Start a comprehensive review and audit of all of your existing survey and listening posts, ensuring you are asking the right questions and capturing the most appropriate metrics in regards to consumer duty. We can provide actionable recommendations to ensure your listening posts are set up to deliver the right outcomes, and that your surveys are WCAG 2.0 compliant.

#3: Evaluate and Solve Compliance Issues at Scale 

Delivering consistent and compliant customer communications can feel like a daunting task. We can help you evaluate all structured, semi structured, and unstructured communication to advise if each piece of communication is compliant with the consumer duty before they go live, providing recommendations for areas of improvement. 

#4: Create Seamless Experiences for Your Most Vulnerable Customers 

It is critical that your most vulnerable customers continue to have a seamless experience with your brand. Our technology can automatically alert you to any aspects of your customer journey that are not providing an inclusive experience. Through our unique Consumer Duty Taxonomy consisting of DEI, Compliance, and the Financial Services Industry Pack, we can identify those customers who are NOT getting the right outcomes, and provide recommendations on how to improve their experience.

#5: Combine a Compliance Focus With a Customer-Centric Culture

The most successful brands will be those that focus on enhancing their customer-centric culture, putting the customer at the heart of all decision making, rather than focusing only on a compliance- first approach. Celebrate and socialise positive customer experiences, champion positive customer outcomes across the entire organisation.

If you’d like to learn more about how InMoment can help, please reach out to voc@inmoment.com or click here to read our full consumer duty solution brief!

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 this episode of the XI Café Podcast, we’re talking to State Revenue Office Victoria (SRO) Customer Experience Manager, Desmond Strydom. Desmond has over a decade of experience in this field, and in his current role, he has spearheaded and launched the VoC program at SRO. Desmond will talk about the SRO journey of launching a new VoC program, gaining support from leadership, and some of the early success stories the team has seen.

Where to Find the XI Café Podcast

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon 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!

It’s that time of year again! XI Forum Sydney and Singapore are back and this year, they’re jam-packed with hands-on demonstrations, workshops, and interactive opportunities to help you extract tangible value from our speakers, as well as gain applicable knowledge for your experience program. 

Here are five reasons why you should save your spot today:

Reason #1: Implement ‘Integrated CX’ for Your Brand

What is integrated CX? Not only is this the theme of our upcoming XI Forums, but it’s also InMoment’s approach to help businesses take action on their customer experience initiatives to ultimately deliver measurable business outcomes. 

Integrated CX connects critical aspects of a successful customer experience, including:

  • Integrated Signals: Bringing together the voice of customers and not-yet customers across the full customer journey from surveys, chats, reviews, calls, etc.
  • Integrated Insights: Delivering both leading innovative technology and strategic expertise to deliver ROI
  • Integrated Action: The ultimate goal is to eliminate any and all silos that exist in many companies, facilitating a coordinated, data-driven approach to prioritising which action will get your business the best results

Discover what integrated signals, integrated insights, and integrated actions can do for your experience program.

Reason #2: Learn From Award-Winning Speakers

The 2023 speaker line up has been announced and the content is more practical than ever. Joining us on stage, we have:

  • InMoment’s Chief Product Officer, Sandeep Garg taking delegates through how integrated CX applies to your experience program
  • Craveable Brand’s Chief Customer Officer, Jess Gill will share Oporto, Red Rooster, and Chicken Treat’s journey to shift their culture toward customer centricity and the wins they’ve had as a result. 
  • Downer New Zealand’s National Customer Experience and Marketing Manager, Scott Wilson and HR Business Partner, Jake Barker. Together, they will share how these two business units work together to make experiences better for both customers AND employees.  
  • Aesop’s Voice of the Customer Global Program Manager, Jason Katsambiris will take delegates through what it takes to run a global VoC program across different languages, cultures, and markets— designing a program that ingests and makes sense of linguistically dispersed customer signals to enable customer engagement at scale.
  • Fonterra’s VoC Program Manager, Roshena de Leon. Through embedding an integrated experience program, Roshena will share with delegates her experience driving CX collaboration across teams, using simple frameworks to drive sustainable change.
  • Commonwealth Super Corporation’s Customer Experience and Insights Manager, Katie Bogg, will host a workshop designed to give you hands-on experience on getting your program noticed from frontline employees, buy-in from C-suite executives, gaining momentum for customer-led initiatives, and anchoring your program around an elevator pitch for experience improvement success. 
  • legalsuper’s Data, Insights, and CX Manager, Eslam Affifi—after winning last year’s CX Award for using data to unlock customer insights, Eslam will help you understand the “why” behind your program, and the challenges that legalsuper overcame to build out its experience improvement program.
  • InMoment’s Director of Experience Improvement, Josh Marans will teach delegates how InMoment launched our own internal award-winning experience improvement program, and the mistakes you can avoid when launching yours.

Reason #3: Network With Your Peers

Network with 100+ senior CX practitioners from the region’s leading brands. That’s right—there will be plenty of opportunities to meet new people and create new connections throughout the day and learn from their unique experiences. 

Reason #4: The Conference Is More Practical Than Ever

XI Forum Sydney and Singapore have a reputation for being the most practical conference in the APAC region. The conference is designed to give you a behind-the-scenes look at some of Australia’s best performing experience programs, and take learnings from the experts to apply to your program from day one. You will discover CX resources, client stories, frameworks, and methodologies that will be revealed to delegates for the first time. 

Reason #5: We’re Coming to a City Near You! 

This year we’ve added another location to the XI Forum APAC tour—we’ll be visiting Sydney and Singapore! 

What are you waiting for? We would love to have you join us at one of these locations:

XI Forum Sydney: 15th March 2023

XI Forum Singapore: 24th March 2023


Any questions we didn’t answer here? Reach out to infoapac@inmoment.com

CX Program

We’ve evaluated the pros and cons of primary reporting locations for the customer experience (CX) function and ideal CX leader qualities in previous articles, “Where Should CX Live Within An Organization?” and “Does Who’s Driving the CX Bus Make a Difference?

It’s now time to discuss the organizational elements that are necessary for CX to thrive in an organization (regardless of the reporting structure your organization chooses or the characteristics of the person leading the CX function).

We utilize a continuous improvement framework with our clients that starts with the principle of “design with the end in mind.” This means achieving one or more of the four key economic pillars: acquiring more customers, keeping more customers (reducing churn), growing lifetime customer value (CLV), or reducing cost to serve.

The Five Stages of the Continuous Improvement Framework:

Stage #1: Design

Clearly design an experience strategy that aligns with overall company goals and brand promise, driving customer outcomes.

Stage #2: Listen

Thoughtfully deploy modern listening strategies and data integrations across the journey to expand and enhance an integrated view and holistic customer understanding.

Stage #3: Understand

Consolidate all data streams and leverage advanced analytics to identify where and how to act (and the anticipated impact on customer outcomes).

Stage #4: Transform

Create & implement dynamic action plans, training, and policies that facilitate organizational change (and promote activities that drive customer outcomes).

Stage #5: Realize

Evaluate and demonstrate results of experience initiatives including (but not limited to) organizational change, improved metrics, and financial impact.

Building the Foundation for A Successful CX Program: Moving Beyond the Continuous Improvement Framework

Beyond those five core stages, though, there are certain foundational and organizational elements that must be present for CX to thrive in your company.


What these additional elements suggest is that customer experience is a team sport that requires the participation, alignment, and coordination of the entire organization—and that your success will be limited if it is a grassroots effort and not a strategy led and supported by the executive leadership team. That alignment and shared understanding is vital to CX success, and by extension, the wider success of your entire organization.

Our hope is that this three-part series has given you much to consider about your organization’s customer experience efforts. Based on what we see in the marketplace, too many programs are still stuck in the Listen and Understand stages and have not figured out how to get organized to break down silos in order to drive effective improvement efforts or don’t have the executive leadership and buy-in to facilitate this. Breaking down these silos, both in terms of the organizational design as well as internal data structures, requires executive leadership engagement and strategies to enable a single view of the customer.

Driving ROI from your customer experience efforts continues to be the biggest conversation in the CX community and the greatest challenge for most companies. And your C-Level executives, board and shareholders expect this.

Being organized properly, having the right people with the skill sets that we discussed in place, migrating your culture to one of customer-centricity and getting organizational alignment on what customers need and how to best, and most efficiently, meet these desires is really tough work. But it is critical to have all of these elements in place in order to drive the best CX outcomes. And the companies that can do this are the ones that stand to reap the greatest benefits in terms of future revenue and market share growth and long-term profitability.

Survey Rating Scale

You’re sitting down to carve out the newest survey in your customer experience (CX) program. You know what touchpoint you’re examining, what you’re hoping to learn, and what questions you’re going to ask. Now it’s time to settle on the survey rating scale you’ll use.

Unsure of which scale to choose? I’m Kiri Burgess, a Senior CX Consultant at InMoment APAC. Together, with our Director of Marketing Sciences, Sharon Allberg, in this post we’ll share with you a collection of best practice tips for using rating scales in your customer surveys 

What Is a Survey Rating Scale? 

If you’ve ever put together a customer survey, you will no doubt have used a rating scale as an option for respondents. 

Survey rating scales are a way to ask a “closed question” to survey respondents, and collect valuable input in a quantitative way. Here’s an example:

There are a number of important considerations when using rating scales including:

  • Number of scale points
  • Anchoring of scale points
  • Midpoints
  • Colors and images

The choice of which survey rating scale to use can be perplexing. And while academic research is vast, it’s not always relevant to market or customer experience research, which can leave a number of unanswered questions.

Whatever scale you choose, the aim with a survey rating scale is to limit individual interpretation and ambiguity. In an ideal world, you want all respondents to view a scale in the same way.

Having reviewed scale literature and our own internal research; then overlaid client and research experience, here are five tips for survey rating scale success:

Here Are Five Pro Tips for Survey Rating Scale Success

Tip #1: Longer Scales Typically Reveal More Actionable Insight 

There is not a great deal of evidence on the difference in performance between shorter (i.e. 5 point) or longer (i.e. 10 point) scales from a respondent point of view—but the advantage of a longer scale is you’ll get greater differentiation in response. Responses will be more spread out due to having a longer scale. This typically results in stronger driver analysis revealing more actionable insight.  

Tip #2: Keep Survey Rating Scales as Consistent as Possible 

If you can, decide on a rating scale size and stick with it throughout your survey. Greater scale consistency will not only make it easier for respondents but it also makes it easier to communicate what a good result looks like to the business as all questions will calculate ‘good’ the same way with the same scale points. We understand that this isn’t always straight forward so if you do change your scale in your survey, that’s okay. Our advice would be not to chop and change scale lengths multiple times which will cause respondents confusion and fatigue.

Tip #3: Label Your Scales Appropriately 

How to best label your scale will depend on the scale length.  For shorter 5 point scales, we recommend labeling each scale point for clarity. However, this isn’t an easy task for longer 10 or 11 point scales as you quickly run out of space (particularly on mobile devices!). Therefore for longer scales, we recommend labeling the end points only. Whatever scale you go for, labels should only be attached to the appropriate single scale point.

Tip #4: When It Comes to Mid Points, Assess On a Case-by-Case Basis

Researchers like to include mid points for respondents who are undecided.

There is some evidence that neutral respondents will answer randomly if they don’t have a neutral option to pick; however, this point-of-view comes from the world of public policy research. Therefore, at InMoment we recommend a case-by-case approach and to include a midpoint if it makes sense. With satisfaction or agreement scales, it is more common to use a midpoint.

Tip #5: Avoid Scale Colors and Images 

Research has shown that coloring scales (even shades of gray) or adding images or icons (including smiley faces) is not recommended, as this leads to scales being inconsistently interpreted by respondents. Examples include colors being an issue for those who are color blind; and images, icons and smiley faces having different meaning for everyone, particularly those who are neurodiverse (which is estimated at 15-20% of the population).

There you have it—five best practices to help you avoid bias, optimise your surveys, and collect the most actionable insights possible. To learn more about best practice surveys, check out this paper on Transactional Customer Experience Survey Best Practices.

XI Café Podcast

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, Melanie Disse from Auckland-based CX firm—Melanie Disse Consulting answers questions such as:

  • How mature are Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs in New Zealand compared to other countries?
  • How does your organisation’s VoC program compare?
  • What can you do to elevate the level of VoC program maturity at your organisation?

Melanie is an experienced Voice of Customer strategist with over a decade of experience in CX, insights, research, and data-driven intelligence for some of the world’s leading brands. Melanie explains what drives VoC program maturity and how leaders can increase the reach and effectiveness of their programs to improve customer experience and drive better business results.

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!

Customer Lifetime Value

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!

XI Café Podcast

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!

Digital experience

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

  1. Build a Strong Foundation with Integrated Experience
  2. Strategize New Customer, Employee, & Non-Buyer Signals
  3. 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! 

XI Café Podcast

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!

Failure Demand

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. 

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