Customer Churn and Its Impact on Business Success

Customer churn is when a customer stops doing business with your organization. This is an important statistic for businesses to have to assess customer satisfaction and build sustainable growth.
Customer Churn

It’s important to keep track of how many customers leave and why they leave so that you can make the right adjustments for future customers and hopefully improve customer retention. However, it can be difficult to measure these types of factors and produce usable data. That’s why businesses need to keep track of customer churn, which is the metric used to measure how well you are retaining customers. Discover the ins and outs of customer churn and what business owners can do to make the most of their circumstances.

What Is Customer Churn?

Customer churn occurs when someone chooses to discontinue using your products or services—or in other words, they are no longer a customer. Also known as customer attrition, customer churn gives a business owner insight into how well their business is doing over time, which is an essential part of management and growth.

More specifically, customer churn is measured and evaluated using a customer churn rate. This rate reflects the number of customers who stopped using services or products during a set period. This set period could be any relevant time frame your company is analyzing, including a year, a financial quarter, or even a single month. This churn rate is also useful in customer churn analysis. 

Types of Customer Churn

When looking at customer churn, each case can be divided into one of two categories: voluntary churn or involuntary churn. 

  • Voluntary Churn: Voluntary churn occurs when a customer actively chooses to stop doing business with you. This decision is driven by dissatisfaction, a change in needs, or moving to a competitor. This may look like a customer buying from a competitor after experiencing long wait times with your organization. 
  • Involuntary Churn: Involuntary churn occurs when customers stop doing business with you without intending to. This is often due to avoidable factors such as payment issues or subscription expiration. An example of this is a customer’s credit card expires, and they forget to update their payment information, leading to an unintentional cancellation of their subscription.

It is important to understand these two types of churn and how each of them can be addressed. 

Why is Customer Churn a Problem?

Customer churn is a problem that businesses should seek to solve because it directly affects revenue, reputation, and growth. 

When customers leave, your business loses the immediate sales from those customers and the potential for future revenue. Since acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing customers, you will be forced to spend more to cover the churned customers’ loss. 

Furthermore, a high churn rate can be indicative of dissatisfaction with your products or services. Dissatisfied customers who have churned can harm your brand reputation by leaving a negative review or sharing their bad experiences on social media. 

These results of customer churn will ultimately end with your business struggling to maintain sustainable growth. Long-term customer relationships are important for an organization to be able to grow, and customer churn disrupts this cycle. 

Why Is Customer Churn Important?

Churn rates examine the recurring business and value lost over certain periods. It’s important to look at customer churn to prevent customers from leaving due to problems you could potentially solve, which protects your brand, money, and future. Here are some of the more specific reasons why customer churn is important to measure:

Brand Impact

Dissatisfied customers negatively impact your brand equity, and especially in a market that is driven by the internet and influencers, it can be dangerous to your company if customers leave for a similar reason and discuss it online. 

Not only are you losing their business, but having dissatisfied customers also makes it more difficult to find new customers if the brand receives a bad reputation from dissatisfied customers. This could be news spreading by word of mouth, reviews, or social media.

Costly Consequences

Customer churn costs money, not only because you would be losing someone’s immediate purchases, but because customer loyalty is a huge asset to companies. Returning customers tend to spend more money on a brand once they have made a decision to become loyal customers, and finding and persuading new customers can be very costly and time-consuming. Ultimately, losing customers who spend a lot on your brand can affect the bottom line in the present and over time.

Future Growth

You need the loyalty of your customers to sustain your business, especially when you roll out new products or initiatives. If there aren’t people around to get excited about new products and services, companies can wear themselves thin because they focus on the basics that need to be fixed rather than healthily expanding.

Competitive Advantage

With every industry getting more and more competitive, it’s more important than ever to be at the top of your game. The last thing you want is a new competitor stealing clients or customers, especially if you can offer a solution for those customers. This competition should encourage organizations to focus not only on new business but also on retaining existing customers.

Proactive Business Strategies

Some problems arise seemingly out of nowhere and businesses must adapt as needed. Others, though, can be identified in advance by closely watching customer churn, which means you can put certain procedures in place to prevent serious losses. If you can predict customer churn after measuring it over time, you can do more to prevent it than wait until it is too late.

Why Does Customer Churn Happen?

Customer churn is more than a metric; it’s an indicator of how well your services, products, and sometimes employees are performing. Sometimes all companies go through a higher customer churn period, but it’s always important to know your potential blind spots and look for creative solutions. The most common reasons include the following scenarios.

Poor Customer Service

Whether you offer an immediate service or online resources for purchases, how people feel treated makes a big impact on whether or not they stick around. High customer churn rates may be an indicator that your employees or teams “on the field” directly interacting with customers may need more training or evaluations.

Misalignment with Customer Needs

You may have a great product, but you aren’t going after the right group of customers. Marketing is a key element of any business venture, including gathering research about who needs your products and how. It’s also possible that customers need new or improved features, so you may have the right audience, but you don’t understand their needs. Feedback is critical to understanding the needs of your customer community.

Pricing Concerns

If your prices are lightyears ahead of competitors and you don’t update your services, especially as other competitors join the market, even the most loyal of customers may switch to either a more affordable option or whoever gives them the biggest bang for their buck. 

External Factors

If you’re in a niche industry, you may not get consistent sales—a Christmas lights company isn’t going to have the same customer volumes year-round. You should consider this when calculating your churn rate and also see if there are things you can do during the off-season to bring in more customers. This could be adding products or services to make your offering more appealing outside of your primary season.

Furthermore, economic downturns or personal financial difficulties can cause customers to cut back on spending, resulting in churn. These factors do not affect your business exclusively and need to be taken into consideration when examining churn rates. 

Lack of Engagement

Most businesses need to have an online presence to properly promote and market their company and products. Without it, your brand awareness and loyalty will go down, meaning valuable old customers won’t stick around with a decent competitor actively drawing them away. Similarly, low-quality content and communications are also a turnoff for a lot of customers.

What is Customer Churn Analysis?

Customer churn analysis examines an organization’s customer churn rate to understand what caused customers to churn and how it can be improved in the future. Customer churn analysis is a critical part of improving your organization’s customer churn rate because you will gain the necessary information to create an action plan to reduce churn and improve overall customer satisfaction. 

An example of customer churn analysis is seeing why a specific subset of customers are churning. To do this, you can take the number of customers that churned and filter that data to represent just the demographic you are examining. Then, you can identify what caused these customers to churn and work on making customer experience improvements to prevent it from happening in the future. 

Customer churn analysis software

How To Calculate Customer Churn Rate

The customer churn rate is usually expressed using a percentage, and the higher the percentage, the more customers are leaving and the more business you’re losing. At its core, the customer churn rate is calculated by dividing the number of customers lost by the number of total customers in a set period.

Another way to look at it is by using a formula. The customer churn rate equation looks like this:

Customer churn formula

For example: let’s say a company has 500 customers at the beginning of the quarter, but by the end, it has 450 customers. That means the company lost 50 customers, and when you divide that by the total number of customers for that quarter (500), you get 0.1. Multiply that by 100 to get your percentage and there you have it: the company had a 10% churn rate for that quarter.

Depending on the service or product, it may be challenging to determine what losing a customer looks like. If your service is a monthly subscription to your product, it’s easy to determine when someone unsubscribes. However, if you have a one-time service, it’s more difficult to approximate when you’ve “lost” a customer. 

Some industries go months before services are needed, like home furniture stores or car dealerships. Those sales cycles are much broader and if they don’t see returning clients for even years, it doesn’t mean they’ve lost any value or money—that’s simply the nature of the field. Generally, you can estimate when a customer no longer uses your service by using the frequency of their purchases as a baseline.

Average Churn Rate
Ideally, everyone would have a 0% churn rate, but that’s not a realistic expectation to have. A 5%-8% churn rate is usually considered average, but it depends on the market, the industry, the size of your business, and more.

What is A Good Customer Churn Rate?

A good average churn rate across all industries is 4%, which can generally be used as a good benchmark for your business. However, customer churn rates vary widely by industry. 

For example, the median churn rate for the digital media and entertainment industry is 6.9%, while the median churn rate for the software industry is almost half of that at 3.5%. Knowing these industry-specific metrics will be much more valuable than an umbrella statistic. 

Tips for Customer Churn Rate

To predict customer churn, you need to be able to identify the things that have the biggest impact on your customer experience. This involves a combination of data analysis, customer feedback, and understanding the nuances of your customer journey. Here are some steps you can take to predict customer churn:

Know Your Key Drivers

In order to identify customer churn indicators, you need to identify the key drivers behind your customer experience. If you know that sales promotions have the biggest impact on your customer experience metrics, then a lack of sales promotions could be an early sign of churn. Other factors include a drop in engagement, lower transaction volumes, or an increase in negative feedback.

Once you know your biggest CX drivers, you can continuously monitor them to keep customers from churning. 

List of customer satisfaction drivers

Identify and Address Early Warning Signs

Depending on your business, there can be many early warning signs that a customer is about to churn. For example, if they become inactive or are using your product less frequently, cancel or downgrade a subscription, or start making late payments, these are all early signs of churn. 

When customers exhibit these behaviors, it is important that they become a top priority and are re-engaged as soon as possible. 

How can Customer Churn be Prevented?

Preventing customer churn is essential to your business strategy. It starts with measuring customer churn and finding the root of the problem. Then, you work on solutions. Here is a list of ideas and tips on how to tackle customer churn.

Focus on Your Best Customers

Pay special attention to your most loyal customers and make sure they feel appreciated. Loyal customers will share your content and be a promoter for your brand without being paid if they feel appreciated.

Analyze Churn in Real-Time

Analyze churn as it occurs instead of waiting to fix the issue. The more preventative maintenance you can do, the better. In order to prevent customer churn, you need customer experience software that can accurately predict customer sentiment. Being able to detect customer sentiment will allow you to predict what actions a customer is likely to take based on their feedback. 

For example, a customer might leave an online review expressing their negative feelings about their most recent purchase. With the right tools, you can recognize the importance and flag this review as a high-priority case so that it is resolved quickly, which will result in a saved customer.

Case management software

Conduct Competitive Analysis

Do a competitive analysis to see what your competitors are offering that may persuade customers to abandon your brand.  Understanding their strengths can help you address gaps in your own offerings that might be driving customers away.

Lower Customer Churn with InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience platform gives you all the tools you need to analyze, track, and reduce customer churn. With the ability to view customer interactions from every source in one place, measure unstructured feedback, and more, it is the perfect tool to help you connect more with your customers. To see how it can help your business, schedule a demo today!

References 

Recurly Research. What is a good churn rate? (https://recurly.com/research/churn-rate-benchmarks/). Accessed 8/30/2024.

Customer Experience Consulting: Why It’s the Key to Your Success

Customer experience consulting is a strategic necessity. A skilled customer experience consultant can transform your business by driving loyalty, satisfaction, and ROI. Explore what customer experience consulting entails, why it’s crucial for your business, and how working with a top-notch customer experience consultant can drive your business to new heights.
Financial Services Grow Share of Wallet

What is Customer Experience Consulting?

Customer experience consulting is a specialized service that helps businesses enhance the experiences they provide to their customers across every touchpoint—from the initial awareness stage to post-purchase support.

But what does that really mean for your business? Essentially, a customer experience consultant dives deep into your customer interactions, analyzes data, and helps you craft strategies that not only meet but exceed customer expectations. It’s about making sure every interaction adds value and strengthens the customer relationship. By partnering with a customer experience consulting firm, businesses gain insights and strategies tailored to their unique challenges and opportunities, ensuring they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

What are the Benefits of having a Customer Experience Consultant?

Why should you invest in a customer experience consultant? Can’t your in-house team handle it? The truth is, while your team knows your business inside and out, a customer experience consultant brings a fresh perspective and specialized expertise that can make all the difference.

A customer experience consultant dives deep into your customer data, identifies pain points, and develops strategies that are proven to improve customer satisfaction and retention. But it’s not just about solving problems—it’s about driving growth. Customer experience consultants, like the experts at InMoment, can help you craft experiences that turn customers into brand advocates, increasing their lifetime value and positively impacting your bottom line. By leveraging their expertise, you can avoid common pitfalls and fast-track your way to a more loyal and satisfied customer base.

What to Look for in a Customer Experience Consultant?

With so many options out there, it can be overwhelming to select a customer experience vendor with the right consulting services but asking the right questions can help you find the perfect fit.

Experience and credentials are key. Look for consultants who have years of experience and a track record of success across various industries. Questions you should ask when meeting with a CX consultant should include:

  • How many clients have they worked with?
  • Can they share examples of businesses they’ve worked with that are similar to yours (in terms of industry, size, or challenges)?
  • What is their specific expertise within customer experience (e.g., journey mapping, voice of customer programs, etc.)?
  • How do they stay updated on the latest CX trends and technologies?
  • What is their process for assessing and improving customer experience?
  • How do they tailor their approach to the unique needs of different businesses?
  • What frameworks or tools do they use to measure customer satisfaction and other CX metrics?
  • How do they leverage data and analytics to improve customer experience?
  • Can they help integrate customer feedback systems with your existing platforms?
  • What kind of results have they delivered? 
  • What is the average customer experience ROI have their clients seen?
  • Do they have experience in your industry? 

In addition to the questions, a reputable customer experience consulting firm should offer proof of their success—whether through CX case studies, testimonials, or data showcasing improved customer satisfaction and ROI.

Additionally, consider their approach to consulting customer experience. Are they focused on understanding your unique needs and challenges, or do they offer one-size-fits-all solutions? The best consultants take the time to understand your business and tailor their strategies accordingly.

What Services Should be Included in Customer Experience Consulting?

It’s not just about receiving advice—it’s about a comprehensive partnership that equips your business to succeed. A comprehensive service package should include the following:

  • Onboarding and Training: Your consultant should provide a thorough onboarding process, ensuring that your team understands the tools, strategies, and processes involved in the new CX approach.
  • Journey Mapping: One of the first steps in consulting customer experience is creating detailed customer journey maps. These visual representations of the customer experience help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
  • Regular Meetings and Reporting: Ongoing communication is key. Expect regular check-ins and detailed reports that track progress, analyze data, and adjust strategies as needed.
  • Tool Integration: Whether it’s a CRM system, customer feedback tools, or analytics software, your consultant should help integrate the necessary technology to support your CX strategy.

This is where InMoment’s CX services shine. Our customer experience consultants are dedicated to setting you up for long-term success, offering a personalized approach that aligns with your business goals.

Working with InMoment’s CX Experts 

At InMoment, we believe that exceptional customer experiences are integral to business success. Our mission is to help you drive business value by being bold in the moments that matter. Our CX experts bring years of experience across diverse industries, offering best-in-class technology and comprehensive consulting to ensure you achieve outstanding results.

We don’t just provide consulting services—we become an extension of your team. Our approach is hands-on and collaborative, ensuring that we understand your unique challenges and goals. From the initial consultation to ongoing support, our customer experience consultants work closely with you to design and implement strategies that resonate with your customers, improve customer experience KPIs, and drive measurable outcomes.

Whether you’re looking to enhance your current customer experience efforts or need a complete overhaul, InMoment’s CX experts are here to guide you every step of the way. With our support, you’ll be equipped to deliver experiences that not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations, fostering loyalty and driving sustained growth. 


InMoment’s integrated CX approach has proven to boost customer lifetime value and accelerate bottom-line performance in just 12 months—well ahead of the industry average of 25 months. Get more insights and details with our ROI calculator

Final Thoughts

In today’s market, customer experience is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a critical component of business success. By investing in customer experience consulting services, you’re not just improving customer satisfaction—you’re building a foundation for long-term growth. Whether you’re looking to enhance existing strategies or start from scratch, a skilled customer experience consultant can guide you every step of the way. And when you choose InMoment, you’re choosing a partner committed to your success. Schedule a CX demo to get started on transforming your business.

A Deep Dive into the Voice of the Customer

Embracing the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a powerful strategy for businesses looking to thrive in a customer-centric environment. By actively listening and responding to customer feedback, you can build stronger relationships, enhance your products and services, and position your business for sustained success.
A man in a woman in a shopping mall

Did you know that over 70% of consumers expect personalized communications and tailored products/services from companies they buy from? Of those customers, 76% get frustrated when they do not receive any level of personalization. When companies do offer personalized experiences, 78% of those customers who receive that level of personalization are likely to make repeat purchases.

With these statistics in mind, it is clear that delivering consistent, memorable experiences is a must for any organization looking to build and sustain a loyal customer base. The only way to do this is by listening to what your customers are saying, which is referred to as the Voice of the Customer.

What is Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business. The goal is to learn about their expectations regarding the business’ products or services. 

Often applied as a market research technique by firms looking to achieve a better and more complete understanding of the customer, Voice of the Customer can also help companies measure and understand the experiences that they deliver to customers. Armed with this knowledge, companies can build stronger brands, function as more efficient organizations, and deliver a better customer experience.

A Voice of the Customer program helps your business reap the benefits of listening, acting, and responding to what customers say about your brand, product, service, or business location. This can help you deliver improved experiences, offer better products and services, and create more value for customers.

Why Voice of the Customer Is Important

Voice of the Customer data is important for several reasons in business and product development. Primarily, Voice of the Customer programs help organizations become more customer-centric by understanding customer needs, preferences, and expectations. This customer-centric focus is crucial for developing products, services, and experiences that align with what customers truly want.

VoC data is also a valuable source of insights for innovation. Understanding customer pain points and desires can guide the development of new products or features that address unmet needs, giving companies a competitive advantage.

Essentially, once fortified with this extensive and comprehensive data, CX leaders can: 

  • Discover why feedback scores, such as net promoter scores are not up to par. 
  • Comprehend customer desires, needs, and criticisms. 
  • List the above data in order of importance for improving performance. 
  • Fully grasp customers’ perception of the value of a company’s product(s) and/or service(s) offer. 
  • Learn if and where the company is fulfilling its promises and areas where it fails to do so. 
  • Utilize all the data to inform improvements in the way products and services are created and offered to a now better-understood customer demographic.
  • Solicit customer feedback to evaluate new ways of gaining a competitive advantage.
  • Generate advanced marketing insights and opportunities.

Benefits of a Voice of the Customer Program

Businesses without a Voice of Customer program observe which of their products or services are being sold most frequently, and assume that is what customers want more of. However, this approach leaves out key qualitative details such as which areas of the buying experience customers would change. 

Voice of the Customer programs allows organizations to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and the decisions they make. These benefits can range from operational improvements to changes in product development. Here are some common benefits of effective voice of the customer programs: 

Improve Customer Retention

It is no secret that your existing customers are easier to sell to and will spend more than first-time customers. By implementing a Voice of the Customer program, you can open a direct line of communication for customers to address their concerns and frustrations so that the company can act on those frustrations to improve the overall experience. This will allow you to decrease customer churn and improve customer retention. 

Improve Brand Reputation

A Voice of the Customer program enhances brand reputation by ensuring timely and thoughtful responses to customer feedback. By staying connected to the platforms where customers share their experiences, your business can quickly address online reviews, demonstrate attentiveness, and show a commitment to customer satisfaction. This responsiveness not only resolves individual concerns but also builds trust and reinforces a positive brand image across your customer base.

Reduce Customer Complaints and Faster Resolutions

By systematically gathering customer opinions and experiences, businesses can identify issues early on, even before customers actively complain. Early detection allows for proactive problem-solving.

Moreover, Voice of the Customer programs help businesses understand the severity and impact of different issues. This allows for the prioritization of problems based on their urgency and potential impact on customer satisfaction. Addressing high-priority issues first contributes to faster resolution.

Drive Product Innovations

Voice of the Customer data helps companies stay aligned with market trends and shifts. This knowledge is crucial for driving product and service innovation, adapting strategies, staying relevant, and ensuring that your offerings remain in tune with evolving customer expectations. 

Boost Your Revenue

A natural consequence of expanding the customer base and retaining customers is an increase in revenue. As companies monitor customer feedback and trends, they have a clear picture of what products and services customers want and are willing to pay for, which means that the company can provide those with greater accuracy.

If you want to see how much revenue InMoment can deliver for you with Voice of Customer surveys, check out our ROI calculator!

Improve Customer Experience 

All of these benefits work together to create a more cohesive and satisfying customer experience. By actively listening to customer feedback, addressing their needs, and continuously improving products and services, businesses can deliver a personalized and seamless experience at every touchpoint. This holistic approach not only meets but often exceeds customer expectations, fostering loyalty, encouraging positive word-of-mouth, and ultimately driving long-term success.

3 Questions to Consider Before Building a Voice of the Customer Program

These three questions can guide companies’ efforts to implement an effective Voice of the Customer program to improve the customer experience, retain customers, and boost revenue.

1. What Is the Goal of the Voice of the Customer Program?

Without a clear goal, it is difficult to start a Voice of the Customer program since the strategies used should reflect the business objective. Before companies start building a program, they should first examine potential objectives and determine which will be the most beneficial for their specific needs. 

The objectives of a voice of the customer program can be divided into two main categories: benchmarking and continuous improvement. 

Benchmarking

Programs that focus on benchmarking as an objective tend to be more comparative. This means that the surveys used to gather customer feedback will use the same set of questions for every respondent, typically in a rating format, and then compare those ratings to each other to find areas for improvement. Often, the focus is on the scores themselves instead of the reason for those ratings, so companies that use this objective will get more general feedback and causality. 

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement objectives, on the other hand, can be more personalized based on certain aspects of the customer and their interaction with the company. While the accompanying surveys can include rating questions, there will also be some open-ended questions that allow respondents to clarify their reasons for the scores they gave. This method can give more detailed insight into the causes of dissatisfaction.

Companies should choose one of these objectives based on the information that they wish to gather to work towards certain goals. Some of the possible goals are:

  • Customer research: For this, companies gather the information that helps them better understand the needs and wants of their target customers.
  • Customer retention: Learning how to best keep existing customers satisfied with the products and services offered is crucial for customer retention.
  • Acquiring new customers: Just as important as retaining customers is acquiring new ones. With this goal in mind, companies should learn how to increase interest in their brand to attract new customers.
  • Improving brand image: This goal focuses on finding out how customers view a company’s brand and what can be done to improve that image.
  • Cost reduction: Focusing on cost-effectiveness by recognizing where you can reduce spending will help you increase profitability and prove ROI. 
  • Increasing customer lifetime value: Customer lifetime value is the revenue earned from a single customer over time. Increasing that will cause your customers to promote your brand for you.

2. What Metrics Should Be Measured Throughout the VoC Program?

Once a company has chosen a goal to drive its VoC program, it should define which metrics will be measured to demonstrate progress and focus the efforts for more improvements. Some common metrics in a Voice of the Customer program include customer experience KPIs such as Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score.

When selecting metrics, consider the holistic picture they paint and how they align with your business goals. Combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights from customer feedback ensures a comprehensive understanding of the Voice of the Customer. Regularly review and adjust your chosen metrics to stay responsive to changing customer needs and business objectives.

3. How Should the Success of the VoC Program Be Measured?

A Voice of the Customer program is only effective if it drives action. To determine whether the feedback being gathered is useful, it is important to look at what has changed since the program was implemented. Measuring success is dependent on setting a clear goal and choosing specific metrics that align with that goal. Because of this, companies should consider whether the metrics being measured are improving over time. The changes made to improve the metrics should help the company work towards its main objective.

Building a Voice of the Customer Program: Best Practices

Before you jump in and begin building your Voice of the Customer program, you’ll need to earnestly attempt to see through your customers’ eyes and link their experience to your business outcomes. Here are some areas of focus and best practices to follow:

Identify Customer Touchpoints 

Customers form their impression of a product or service through multiple interactions with an organization. For instance, folks may find a business by doing an online search or via an ad. They might be introduced through blogs or site reviews, then shop on the company’s website, stop by at a brick-and-mortar retail location, and later on, get in touch with the customer service department. 

A Voice of the Customer program often starts with customer journey mapping and identifying the various touchpoints that will add up to the full customer experience with the company. Keep in mind that combining insights from multiple touchpoints provides a comprehensive view of customer experiences and helps drive informed decision-making.

Collect and Connect Feedback Across Data Channels

Successful Voice of the Customer programs are founded on a company’s ability to listen to customers. To do that successfully, your Voice of the Customer program needs to work as part of your omnichannel customer experience so that you can monitor what customers are saying across all different platforms.  

Analyze Customer Data

After gathering a sufficient amount of data, it’s time to make sense of it. Whether you’re working alone or as a part of a team, you will need to come up with a standard way to understand the Voice of the Customer. 

Analytical methods like natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis can help your business pin down customer sentiment data, emotions, and feelings, helping you see more clearly than ever what customers like and dislike about your brand. 

By translating information into vision, you can achieve a better understanding of the needs, wants, feelings, sentiments, and expectations of your customers. The insights you gather from the Voice of the Customer data will help your entire organization more accurately measure — and more efficiently improve — customer experience.

Collaborate with Teams Across the Entire Organization

Collaboration with other teams within your organization is crucial when managing Voice of the Customer data. This enhances the effectiveness of your efforts and ensures a more comprehensive and integrated approach to customer-centric strategies.

Cross-functional insights are also made possible with greater collaboration. This is why it is important to understand what CX teams in an organization work for your business. When you understand what time is heading the Voice of the Customer program, they can facilitate collaboration across the business. By working with other teams, you gain insights into the end-to-end customer journey, enabling a more comprehensive analysis of customer interactions and pain points.

Take Action and Deliver Insights to the Right People

With all the data and analysis done, you’re ready to create a custom, on-brand Voice of the Customer plan that spurs your team to action in ways that meet the needs of your customers. But it’s not enough to just create a plan and execute it. You’ll also need to monitor its effects regularly. Integrated customer experience platforms allow you to create custom reports that inform company leadership of the effects of Voice of the Customer data on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. 

Don’t forget to share your Voice of Customer insights with key stakeholders and decision-makers. This will unite your company around the goal of meeting customer needs, and to guide and empower everyone to foster improvements in customer experience.

Monitor and Act on Customer Experience Trends

Ongoing monitoring assists in tracking a company’s progress as time goes on. Companies can get stuck debating what metrics they should target. What is more important is to stick to a metric, build a system that lets feedback flow in effortlessly, and watch the metric improve over time, as employees act on this valuable feedback.

How to Collect VoC Data

There are multiple ways to gather or capture Voice of the Customer data. Each of these has benefits and drawbacks, which is why a company may choose to use a combination of these sources and techniques instead of a singular method of collecting data.

As you collect Voice of Customer data, it’s good practice to select the right touchpoints and consider the variety of channels that customers use to interact with your brand throughout their journey. With customer data fragmented across different systems and departments, it may be challenging to identify or prioritize opportunities for improvement without a holistic or integrated approach to managing Voice of the Customer and the customer experience.

Customer Interviews

The traditional technique of gathering data through a customer interview has stuck around for so long because it is a direct way of gathering feedback. Interviews can be done in person, over the phone, or through email depending on the preferences and needs of a company. This technique allows companies to better understand the point of view that a customer or group of customers shares in their interaction with the company.

Surveys

Different types of surveys can be useful when collecting customer feedback. Online, email and SMS customer surveys can include different types of questions to help your team gather meaningful insights into issues that customers face. Some of the different survey questions include multiple-choice questions, drop-down questions, and open-ended questions. The key is to ask the right questions at the right time to gain a better understanding of customers and their expectations at any given point in the customer journey.

Live Chat

A live chat feature on the website is becoming increasingly popular due to the ability to collect real-time customer feedback. Live chats can gather more than customer complaints; they can also provide companies with the opportunity to schedule a follow-up survey to learn about the customer experience on the site. Another great feature is the ability for companies to respond quickly to an issue, which reduces the risk of customers leaving the site feeling unsatisfied with the services or products.

Online Reviews and Social Media

Another way for companies to interact with customers and gather VoC data in real time is through online reviews and social media. Companies can engage in two-way communication with their client base to learn more about what customers are looking for, predict future trends, and gather feedback directly from the source. 

A large part of retaining customers is a positive brand reputation, and responding to online reviews can demonstrate that a company is aware of how customers view their products or services. A good review management strategy also allows companies to learn more about the frustrations that customers face so that they can implement measures to resolve these frustrations and issues.

A business using voice of the customer software to respond to a customer.

Website Behavior

Along with these other techniques for collecting data, a company can analyze the behavior of customers on their website by using tools like heat maps. The company can track these behavior patterns and test potential changes to see what works and what doesn’t, all to create a smoother user experience.

Focus Groups

Focus group discussions are a common and effective method for collecting Voice of the Customer data. Focus groups involve a small, diverse group of participants who discuss their opinions, perceptions, and experiences related to a particular product, service, or topic. 

By leveraging focus groups for Voice of Customer data collection, businesses can gain valuable qualitative insights that go beyond quantitative metrics, helping them better understand the nuances of customer perceptions and preferences.

Voice of Customer: Examples of Survey Questions 

The questions that a company asks as part of its Voice of the Customer program will depend on the goal set at the beginning. For example, if the goal is general customer research, the company will want to ask questions that tell about the demographics of their audience, including:

  • Which of the following categories best describes your age?
  • Which of the following genders do you most identify with?
  • What is the highest level of education you have achieved?
  • How many people work at your company or organization?

On the other hand, the company should ask questions about its products and how they compare to competitors if the goal is to increase customer retention. For example:

  • How does [company, brand, product, or service] compare to the competition?
  • What do you like best about [company, brand, product, or service]?
  • What do you want to be improved about [company, brand, product, or service]?

If the goal is to acquire new customers, companies can ask about how the audience makes decisions. A potential question is:

  • What factor(s) matter most to you when selecting a company for [product or service]?

Finally, companies should ask about their brand if the goal is to improve their brand image. These questions could ask things like: 

  • What word or phrase comes to mind when you see or hear [company, brand, product, or service]?
  • What company comes to mind first when you think of [company, brand, product, or service]?
  • Where have you seen or heard information about [company or brand] in the past six months?

How InMoment Can Power Your VoC Program

Firms are no longer limited to managing Voice of the Customer data from a random sample of customers; now, they can listen in to every customer and every conversation at various stages of the customer journey — not to mention, dig deeper into data on both macro and micro levels.

InMoment’s combination of award-winning technology and expert services can power your Voice of the Customer program and make it comprehensive, simple, and scalable. Experience the transformative capabilities firsthand by exploring our demo. With InMoment, you can navigate and interpret valuable Voice of the Customer data to understand where to focus and how to create the maximum impact for your customer and your business.  

References 

Mckinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 8/27/24.

Conversational Analytics: Powerful Data Behind Business Transformation

Conversational analytics is a powerful tool that can help organizations improve customer experiences, optimize sales and operations, and drive better business outcomes.
Two call center agents using conversation intelligence software

When you analyze the natural language interactions between customers and an organization, conversational analytics unlocks a wealth of insights that can be used to resolve issues faster, enhance agent performance, reduce costs, and demonstrate the value of customer service investments. Discover the power of conversational analytics, its benefits, and the key features to look for in a conversational analytics solution.

What is Conversational Analytics?

Conversational analytics, also called conversational intelligence or conversational AI, is the process of analyzing natural language conversations between an organization’s customer service or contact center agents (both human and virtual) with that organization’s customers or clients. The goal of employing conversational analytics software is to improve the customer experience, leading to greater retention and less churn.  

Conversational analytics software can be applied across a variety of channels where these interactions take place, such as social media, contact centers, online forums, email, messaging apps, or virtual assistants and chatbots. 

Customer data from multiple sources such as calls, reviews, and more.

Why is Conversational Analytics Important?

Conversational analytics is important because conversations are the central point of customer experience improvement. A wealth of insights lies in the interactions between your organization and its customers; however, without specialized technology to analyze that data, those insights remain untapped. 

With conversational analytics, organizations can improve customer experiences by seamlessly combining contact center conversations, emails, chats, and calls, with other customer feedback channels like surveys, reviews, and social media, thereby gaining a holistic view of the customer journey. 

What are the Benefits of Conversational Analytics?

Conversational analytics unlocks valuable insights from customer interactions, enabling businesses to enhance customer experiences, improve decision-making, and boost operational efficiency. By analyzing conversations across multiple channels, companies can better understand customer needs, identify trends, and drive meaningful improvements that lead to greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Resolve Customer Issues Faster 

Conversation analytics enables businesses to identify recurring issues, detect customer sentiment, uncover root causes, assess agent performance, personalize resolutions, automate workflows, and streamline customer support processes. By leveraging these insights, companies can proactively address common problems, prioritize urgent issues, and optimize their operations to resolve customer concerns more efficiently.

Improve Agent Performance and Retention

Conversation analytics provides businesses with invaluable insights into customer interactions, allowing them to identify areas where agents can improve their performance. By analyzing call recordings and agent-customer transcripts, businesses can pinpoint common mistakes, identify training opportunities, and provide targeted coaching. This not only leads to better customer experiences but also boosts agent morale and job satisfaction, ultimately improving retention rates.

Dashboards for a contact center agent and contact center manager.

Reduce Cost to Serve and Handle Time

Conversation analytics can significantly reduce the cost of serving and handling time by identifying inefficiencies in agent interactions. By analyzing conversational data, businesses can pinpoint repetitive tasks, streamline processes, and provide agents with the tools and training they need to resolve issues more efficiently. This ultimately leads to reduced call durations, increased agent productivity, and lower operational costs.

Earn a Higher Share of Wallet 

Conversation analytics can help businesses earn a higher share of wallet by providing insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty. By analyzing customer interactions, businesses can identify opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and provide personalized recommendations. This helps to deepen customer relationships, increase customer lifetime value, and ultimately drive higher revenue.

Demonstrate Return on Customer Service Investment 

Conversation analytics provides businesses with tangible evidence of the customer experience ROI from their efforts. By analyzing customer interactions, businesses can measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rates, and average handle time. This data can be used to demonstrate the impact of customer service initiatives on revenue, cost savings, and customer loyalty, providing a strong justification for continued investment in customer service.

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools.

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Conversational Analytics Examples and Use Cases

Conversational analytics is revolutionizing the way businesses understand and engage with customers. By analyzing interactions across various channels, companies can uncover valuable insights, optimize customer experiences, and make data-driven decisions. Whether it’s improving customer support, enhancing sales strategies, or driving product innovation, conversational analytics offers a wide range of applications and use cases that can significantly impact business outcomes. Discover a few examples and use cases of conversational analytics:

Customer Experience Optimization

Analyzing customer service calls to identify common issues, pain points, and opportunities for improvement can provide valuable insights for improving the customer experience. This can involve monitoring conversations to measure customer intent, satisfaction, sentiment, and the effectiveness of customer service agents. Additionally, automating responses and providing agents with real-time suggestions or next-best actions can help improve the overall customer experience.

Compliance and Risk Management

By monitoring conversations, conversation analytics can detect potential compliance issues, such as the use of inappropriate language or the disclosure of sensitive information. Analyzing interactions can also help identify and mitigate various risks, including potential security breaches or regulatory violations. Conversations can also be automatically flagged for further review or escalation, allowing organizations to proactively address compliance and risk-related concerns.

Sales Process Improvement

Organizations can gain valuable insights into the most effective sales techniques, objection-handling strategies, and customer pain points. This data can then be used to provide sales and customer service teams with recommendations to optimize their sales processes and improve conversion rates. Additionally, conversation analytics can help identify top-performing sales representatives, allowing organizations to train others to adopt the successful tactics of their most effective salespeople.

Product Development and Feedback

Organizations can gather valuable feedback on existing products and services, providing insights that can inform product roadmaps and future development. This process can help identify emerging trends, consumer preferences, and unmet needs that can guide the product development process. Additionally, monitoring social media and online forums can provide real-time feedback and sentiment analysis on products and services, enabling organizations to quickly respond to customer concerns and preferences.

Employee Training and Coaching

Organizations can identify areas for improvement in collaboration, leadership, and professional development. This data can then be used to provide personalized feedback and coaching to employees based on their communication patterns and skill gaps. The automation of coaching opportunities and the sharing of best practices across the organization can help optimize employee development and performance.

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

Organizations can gain a deeper understanding of market trends, competitor positioning, and overall industry dynamics. This data can help identify emerging topics, keywords, and language patterns that provide valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences. Benchmarking the performance of a company’s customer interactions against industry standards or competitors can help identify areas for improvement and opportunities to differentiate the business in the market.

How Does Conversational Analytics Work?

Conversational analytics platforms first collect conversational data from various sources like call recordings, chat logs, emails, and social media interactions. This data is then ingested into the system, where it’s preprocessed to remove noise (e.g., filler words, irrelevant data). For voice-based conversations, the software transcribes spoken words into text using speech-to-text technology, and this transcription serves as the basis for further text analysis.

The software then applies natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand the content of the conversations. This includes tokenization (breaking down text into smaller parts like words and phrases), sentiment analysis and emotion detection (determining the sentiment behind the words), intent recognition (identifying the purpose or intent behind the conversation), and entity recognition (detecting specific information like names, dates, and product names). The software also attempts to understand the context of the conversation, including the relationship between different parts of the conversation and the overall tone. More modern systems also incorporate GenAI models to create summaries of customer interactions. 

Machine learning models are used to identify patterns in conversations, such as frequently asked questions, common complaints, or recurring issues. The software can also detect outliers or unusual behavior in conversations that might indicate problems or opportunities, and it can identify trends over time, such as emerging topics of concern or changes in customer sentiment. The insights derived from the analysis are presented in dashboards, reports, or visualizations, which can include sentiment trends, most common topics or keywords, customer satisfaction metrics, and agent performance metrics.

The software should also integrate with other tools (like CRM systems) and other VoC data to provide actionable insights directly where they’re needed, and alerts or automated actions can be triggered based on specific conditions, such as a drop in customer satisfaction or a surge in negative sentiment. Finally, the software uses feedback and new data to continuously refine its models and improve accuracy over time, with machine learning models being retrained periodically to adapt to new language patterns, customer behaviors, and business needs.

What are the Challenges that come with Conversation Analytics?

Conversation analytics, while a powerful tool, faces several significant challenges. That’s why it’s crucial to recognize these challenges and take steps to address them.

Nuances of natural language and multilingual support

One of the primary difficulties lies in the nuances of natural language. Understanding the context is crucial, as natural language is rich in subtleties that algorithms often struggle to fully grasp. Ambiguity and polysemy—where many words have multiple meanings—add to the complexity, making it challenging to determine the intended interpretation. Additionally, informal languages, such as idioms and slang, can be particularly difficult for machines to understand accurately. Likewise, complexity multiplies when incorporating more languages into the analysis to maintain the software’s accuracy, as many global brands require this capability. 

Data quality

Another major challenge is related to data quality and noise. Transcription errors in speech-to-text processes can lead to inaccurate analysis, while background noise and interference can hinder accurate speech recognition. Furthermore, conversations may be incomplete or cut off, complicating efforts to derive meaningful insights.

Privacy, ethics, and biases

Privacy and ethical considerations also play a critical role in conversation analytics. Handling sensitive information requires robust data security measures, and there’s the added risk that algorithms may perpetuate biases present in their training data, potentially leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes.

Scalability 

Scalability and efficiency present another set of challenges. Analyzing large volumes of conversational data demands significant computational resources, and real-time processing, especially for complex analyses, can be computationally intensive.

Interoperability 

Integration with other systems is also complex. Interoperability challenges arise when attempting to integrate conversation analytics with other systems, such as CRM or marketing automation tools. Ensuring data consistency and compatibility across different systems further complicates the process.

Measurement

Finally, evaluation and measurement are challenging in conversation analytics. Developing appropriate metrics to evaluate effectiveness is difficult, and human judgment is often required to assess the quality of the insights generated by algorithms.

What Features to Consider for Conversational Analytics Software?

Not all conversational analytics software is created equal. That’s why it’s essential to carefully evaluate key features to choose the solution that best aligns with your business needs and empowers you to make data-driven, impactful decisions. Below are key features to consider:

Advanced Transcription Services: Convert extensive audio recordings into text to leverage the capabilities of AI and text analytics.

Agent and Coach Performance Metrics: Evaluate agent and team performance with detailed scorecards highlighting strengths and areas for improvement.

AI-Powered Summarization: Leverage generative AI to reduce average handle time (AHT) by 33% through concise call summaries.

AI-Powered Text Analytics: Analyze unstructured data to uncover feedback patterns, themes, and anomalies.

Conversational Insights: Extract valuable insights from threaded conversations between agents and customers to enhance understanding.

Omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VOC): Integrate interaction data across various channels to create a comprehensive view of customer feedback. This goes beyond just customer sentiment analysis, providing better insights into your customers’ emotions and trends.

Quality Assurance: Identify gaps in knowledge and quality, and discover opportunities to enhance training programs.

Impact Analysis: Identify key factors and opportunities that have the most significant influence on your metrics.

AI generated conversation summary that highlights customer insights

InMoment has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Text Mining and Analytics Platforms for Q2 2024. We earned the highest possible rating in 11 key evaluation criteria, including:

  • AI capabilities in knowledge base, symbolic processing, pre-processing, and post-processing
  • Document-level text mining and natural language processing (NLP)
  • Advanced natural language understanding

We also achieved top rankings for support, innovation, roadmap, and globalization—essential elements that empower you to drive transformative business change.

Partner with InMoment on Conversational Analytics

InMoment’s conversational analytics software utilizes award-winning NLP and AI technology that continuously tops reports by leading analyst firms, so you can be confident you’re receiving state-of-the-art in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing.

InMoment can also go beyond just your conversational data to pull together all of your strongest CX data signals from every system, channel, and perspective for a truly integrated CX program. Unlike other vendors, InMoment uniquely combines software and services for proactive guidance and actionable insight, leading to the highest impact programs with the fastest ROI. Schedule a demo to learn more about our conversation analytics solutions.

Leverage Local Business Listings to Attract New Customers

Local business listings play a vital role in driving organic revenue by improving your online brand visibility. Ensure new customers can find your business online by maintaining complete and recent listings’ information across the web and optimize your listings performance.
waitress and small business owner together proud of cafe and bakery growth with a smile

In today’s digital age, local business listings have become a cornerstone for brands looking to attract customers locally. These listings are essential for boosting your online presence and ensuring potential customers can easily find you. But what exactly are local business listings, and how can brands leverage them as part of their acquisition strategy? In this article, we’ll explore everything you need to know, from the benefits of having a local business listing to best practices in managing and optimizing them at scale.

What Are Local Business Listings?

Local business listings are online entries that provide essential information about your business, such as the name, address, and phone number, also known as NAP. These listings appear in various online directories, search engines, and platforms, allowing customers to discover and connect with your local business. Common platforms where these listings appear include Google My Business, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing Places, and Facebook.

These listings often include additional details such as business hours, services offered, customer reviews, and images, helping potential buyers get a comprehensive view of your business. Essentially, a local business listing serves as your brand’s digital footprint in the local online marketplace.

Google SERP of business listings.

Why Are Local Business Listings Important?

First and foremost, local business listings help increase your online brand visibility, making it easier for potential customers to find you. 97% of consumers search online to find a local business. When your business information appears in local search results, it directly impacts the likelihood of attracting new customers who are actively searching for the products or services you offer.

Moreover, accurate and consistent listings across various platforms boost your credibility and trustworthiness. If your business details are correct and match across all platforms, it signals to both customers and search engines that your business is legitimate and reliable. Inconsistent information, on the other hand, can lead to confusion, a decline in search rank, and missed revenue opportunities.

What Are the Benefits of Local Business Listings?

Local business listings provide a multitude of advantages that can significantly boost your business’s online presence and organic pipeline.

Improved local SEO: Local business listings contribute to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, especially in local searches. The more accurate and consistent your listings are, the higher your chances of ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Increased traffic and sales: With higher online visibility, your local brand is more likely to generate more website visitors, calls, and foot traffic, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Decrease ad spend: When you optimize and manage your local business listings, they rank higher in search results. Increased organic traffic can reduce the need for expensive advertising campaigns and save your business money.

Outrank your competition: Being visible in local search gives you a significant edge over your competitors who may not have optimized their listings, helping you stand out and attract more customers.

Trust and Credibility: A well-maintained local listing with positive ratings, flattering reviews, and accurate information boosts your brand reputation and instills confidence in potential customers.

In summary, local business listings are a powerful tool for boosting your online presence, driving organic traffic, and building trust with potential customers, all while providing a competitive edge and reducing marketing costs.

How to Create a Local Business Listing?

Creating a local business listing is a straightforward process, but it requires careful attention to detail to ensure that you include complete and accurate information that will boost your search results.

Focus on the directory: Instead of spending efforts on trying to get listed everywhere possible, focus on the directories that matter the most. According to local SEO statistics, roughly 75% of new business is influenced by only a handful of business review sites and directories: Google, Facebook, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps. 

Additional Tip: When managing local listings, it’s essential to prioritize directories that rank highly in “near me” search results. To identify these directories, start by conducting a “near me” search related to your business. For example, a Google search for “hotel near me” might highlight top directories like Tripadvisor, Yelp, and Foursquare. This is a great way to increase the chances that people will find your business.

Ensure NAP consistency: Your business name, physical address, and phone number should be the same across all your business citations. This will inform search engines that your business is trustworthy and boost your rankings.

Provide as Many Details as Possible: Supply as much business information as possible, such as business description, category, operating hours, website, services offered, and high-quality images, to give potential customers a complete view of your business.

Maintain positive ratings and a steady stream of positive reviews: Regularly encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and promptly address any negative feedback to build and sustain a strong online reputation.

The Importance of Local Business Listing Management

Once your listings are created, managing them is crucial. Regularly updating your listings ensures that all information remains accurate, which is essential for maintaining customer trust and improving your local SEO. This management also involves responding to customer reviews, both positive and negative, to show that you value customer feedback and are actively engaged with your audience.

Ignoring your listings can result in outdated information, negative customer experiences, and a drop in search engine rankings. Therefore, local business listing management should be an ongoing task for any business looking to maintain a strong local presence and increase organic revenue.

How to Optimize Your Local Business Listings

Optimized local business listings are key to improving your local search rankings and attracting new customers to your business. According to Google, customers are 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to consider purchasing from businesses with a complete Google local business listing. When looking to optimize your business listings, focus on:

Consistency: Ensure that your business information is consistent across all platforms. Inconsistencies can confuse customers and harm your local SEO efforts.

Accuracy: Verify your locations and provide as much information about your business as possible. Update your hours of operation regularly, including special hours for holidays and events.

High-quality images: Add professional photos of your business, products, or services to tell a story and make your listing more attractive. Appealing pictures will show shoppers that your business offers what they’re searching for.

Manage your reviews: Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews after their visit. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers can improve your brand visibility in search. As part of your review management strategy, ensure that you are responding to their feedback right away, showing appreciation and care. 

Utilize listings management software: Take advantage of listings management software to maintain and optimize your listings performance. For brands with multiple locations, managing their business information across the web is almost impossible and it bares a high chance of making a mistake that will cost them a drop in ranking. 

Listing management software like InMoment allows multi-location brands to achieve accuracy and consistency in their listings at scale, rank higher in local searches, and generate more location visits.

How to Measure and Improve Your Local Business Listing Performance

Measuring the performance of your local business listings is key to increasing their positive impact on your revenue. By monitoring key metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your listings for better online visibility and customer engagement.

Traffic increases & customer actions: Keep a close watch on how customers interact with your listings. Monitor clicks, phone calls, and requests for directions to gauge interest and engagement. Analyze any spikes in website traffic or foot traffic to your physical location that can be directly linked to your listings. This helps in understanding how effective your listings management is, alongside your reputation management efforts, in driving potential customers to your business.

InMoment local listings platform that tracks engagement on listings page.

Local search rank: Track your local brand position in search results for specific keywords. Higher visibility means more potential customers discovering your business, leading to increased opportunities for conversion. Use tools, like InMoment’s Reputation Management Software, to monitor your rankings and track keywords that are driving traffic to your listings.

InMoment local listings platform that shows your listings score compared to competitors.

Review scores: Your average review ratings and the volume of reviews provide insight into customer satisfaction and the reputation of your brand. Keeping an eye on these metrics such as your reputation score, helps in identifying areas for improvement and allows you to further boost your listings performance.

Listings data in sync: Ensure all relevant information, such as business hours, address, and contact details, are up-to-date and consistent across all platforms. Regularly audit and update your business information, especially if there are business hour changes during the holidays to maintain a reliable online presence.

Local listings data from InMoment's platform

Improve Your Local Listings With InMoment 

It’s clear that your local business listings have a direct impact on your organic revenue. Managing them to improve online brand visibility is crucial for attracting new customers. However, overseeing multiple locations can be challenging, making it easy to lose track of updates and consistency, which can result in a drop in your search rankings. 

Ensure new customers can find your brand online by utilizing InMoment’s local listings management software to maintain complete and recent listings’ information across the web. Automatically push real-time changes, update business hours, add photos to your Google Business Profile, create relevant Google posts, ask and respond to reviews to gain more online visibility, increase organic sales, and decrease your ad spend. 

References 

safari digital. 19 Local SEO Statistics That Matter in 2024. (https://www.safaridigital.com.au/blog/local-seo-statistics/) Accessed 8/19/24.

Get Ahead of the White House’s “Time Is Money” Initiative – Key Consumer Pain Points And How to Address Them Through Your CX Program

Delivering exceptional customer experiences is a fundamental and necessary business practice that also can significantly impact your bottom line – but up until this point, it wasn’t a requirement. The recent “Time is Money” White House initiative, launched just last week, represents a significant escalation of onus on businesses to address subpar customer experiences and comply with these new directives. 
White House Time is Money Customer Experience Improvement Mandate InMoment

Delivering exceptional customer experiences is a fundamental and necessary business practice that also can significantly impact your bottom line – but up until this point, it wasn’t a requirement. The recent “Time is Money” White House initiative, launched just last week, represents a significant escalation of onus on businesses to address subpar customer experiences and comply with these new directives. 

In an effort to assist organizations in the process of reevaluating their customer experience platform and conversation intelligence infrastructure – including front-line staff training and backend processes – InMoment conducted a market pulse – a deep dive of consumer sentiment –  that combines survey and non-survey data to surface common consumer pain points and provide steps organizations can take to elevate conversational intelligence efforts and get in front of the issues for a competitive advantage – and avoid fines and other costly, negative business impacts. 

Key Insights from the Study

  1. Accessibility to Live Support: 70% of customers struggle to reach a live representative, with 39.6% experiencing this frustration frequently. One in four customers expressed dissatisfaction with long hold times and repeated transfers. This inefficiency drives customers away, leading to increased churn.
  2. Automated Systems: Nearly 68.5% of customers are dissatisfied with automated customer service, feeling trapped in systems that don’t resolve their issues. A significant one in three customers highlighted the need for smarter, more responsive automation.
  3. Omnichannel Communication: Customers demand seamless transitions across communication channels, with 94.2% valuing the ability to reach companies through their preferred method. However, nearly one in five customers are frustrated by having to repeat their issues when switching channels.
  4. Accountability and Transparency: Trust is eroded when promises are broken. One in four customers cited poor follow-up and lack of communication as key frustrations, leading to higher churn rates.

Actionable Strategies to Enhance Customer Experience

Invest in Conversational Intelligence: Elevating your conversational intelligence efforts is becoming more of a necessity in today’s landscape. Use a conversational intelligence software to analyze millions of interactions across call centers, chat, and digital channels to identify and resolve bottlenecks and enhance the contact center experience. By reducing wait times and improving first-call resolution, you can decrease churn by 10% and retain an additional $10 million in revenue annually.

Enhance Automated Systems: Improve your chatbots and phone menus to better understand and address customer needs. The consumer market is evolving – as an example, GenZ is looking for a more self-service, seamless solution – if you aren’t leveraging data to evolve those experiences, you are missing out. A 5% increase in retention due to improved automation can result in $5 million in additional revenue.

Embrace Omnichannel Engagement: Customer centricity is key; as stated above, 70% of customers struggle with live support, and nearly 68.5% feel trapped by automated systems. If your organization isn’t doing whatever you can to learn, gauge insights, and be proactive – millions of dollars of revenue could be at risk. Integrate all customer interactions across channels, including Google Reviews and social media, to ensure seamless service. By doing so, you can reduce churn by 7% and retain $7 million in revenue.

Ensure Accountability: In today’s landscape, consumer trust and accountability are key. Not focusing on these elements can cause your organization to lose loyalty. Creating a proactive closed-loop approach is more important than ever, especially with customer demands changing so rapidly. Implement robust follow-up systems to keep customers informed and fulfill promises. Resolving 95% of complaints within 24 hours can lead to a 12% decrease in churn, retaining $12 million in revenue annually.

The results are clear: brands that fail to address these issues risk losing valuable customers, while those that take proactive steps can secure long-term loyalty and substantial revenue gains.

At InMoment, we don’t just identify problems—we offer the solutions you need to drive real results. Our advanced AI capabilities, combined with actionable insights from customer feedback, empower your brand to take decisive action. By focusing on the entire customer journey, we help you reduce revenue at risk, enhance customer loyalty, and secure long-term growth.

Ready to transform your customer service and see the impact on your bottom line? Contact InMoment today or check out a preview of our platform to learn how we can help you turn insights into actions that drive retention, reduce churn, and protect your revenue.

Lawyer Reputation Management: A Guide for Law Firms

Reputation management is just as important for lawyers and law firms as it is for any other industry. Good lawyer reputation management can lead to increased client trust and improved public perception.

A lawyer’s reputation is one of their most valuable assets. With clients increasingly turning to online resources to evaluate potential legal representation, lawyer reputation management and law firm reputation management have become more crucial than ever. Whether you’re a solo practitioner or part of a larger firm, managing your online presence can significantly impact your success.

What is Lawyer Reputation Management?

Lawyer reputation management involves the strategic process of monitoring, influencing, and enhancing a lawyer’s public perception. This involves online reputation management practices such as managing platforms such as review sites, legal directories, and social media. 

Law Firm Reputation Management is Just As Important

While the reputation of an individual lawyer of a layer is important, law firm reputation management is equally essential. Law firm reputation management focuses on the collective reputation of the entire law firm. It involves managing the firm’s brand, and ensuring that the public, clients, and the media perceive the firm as a trustworthy and competent entity.

Effective management of the firm’s brand builds credibility and trust, which are crucial for attracting new clients, retaining existing ones, and maintaining strong relationships with business partners and the community.

 By focusing on the reputation of the entire firm, you ensure that every member of your team contributes to a unified, positive public image, reinforcing the firm’s standing as a leading legal authority. If you’d like to see where your law firm stands for reputation management compared to industry leaders, look at our legal reputation report!

The Importance of Online Reputation for Lawyers

One of the main reasons that a good online reputation for lawyers is important is because 90% of consumers look at reviews before contacting a lawyer or law firm. This means that your reviews, ratings, and the content available about your firm across the internet play a significant role in shaping perceptions before you even have the chance to speak with a prospective client. 

For many clients, legal issues are often personal, stressful, and potentially life-changing. They need a lawyer they can trust to guide them through these challenging situations. When clients browse online reviews and testimonials, they seek reassurance that your firm has a track record of professionalism, reliability, and success. 

Positive reviews and a strong reputation offer social proof, helping to alleviate anxieties about choosing the right legal representation. The more credible and trustworthy your online reputation, the more likely potential clients are to engage with your services.

The Benefits of Lawyer Reputation Management

A good reputation in the legal field is worth its weight in gold. While upholding a good reputation is as difficult as getting one on in the first place, you will realize many benefits. Here are some key benefits of lawyer reputation management:

Attracting New Clients

A strong, positive reputation is one of the most effective tools for attracting new clients. When potential clients search for legal services online, they often read Google reviews, visit attorney websites, and browse social media profiles before making a decision. 

If your online presence reflects a consistently positive image—through favorable reviews, professional content, and client testimonials—it builds trust and increases the likelihood that they will choose your services over a competitor’s. Effective law firm reputation management ensures that potential clients encounter positive and trustworthy information about your firm at every touchpoint.

Building Trust and Credibility

Trust is at the heart of the attorney-client relationship. Clients seek out lawyers who are not only skilled in their practice areas but who also have a reputation for integrity, reliability, and client-centered service. 

By managing your law firm reputation, you can emphasize your firm’s values, highlight successes, and showcase the positive experiences of past clients. The more credible and trustworthy your firm appears the more likely clients are to feel confident in hiring you for their legal needs. Consistently managing your online presence helps to reinforce this trust and establish your firm as a reliable choice.

Differentiating Yourself from Competitors

The legal field is competitive, and clients often have many options when it comes to choosing a lawyer. Effective law firm reputation management can help your firm stand out in a crowded marketplace. By promoting your unique strengths—whether it’s a track record of success, a particular area of expertise, or exceptional client service—you can differentiate yourself from other firms. 

The benefits of lawyer reputation management go far beyond just attracting new clients—it’s about building trust, differentiating yourself from competitors, and ensuring long-term success. By proactively managing your legal reputation, you create a positive and enduring image that instills confidence in potential clients, strengthens relationships with current ones, and protects your professional standing. 

Legal Reputation Management Strategies

Managing your legal reputation will require a proactive approach that encompasses everything from reviews to public relations. Here are some steps you can take to make sure your reputation management strategies cover every aspect of your business. 

1. Monitor Online Reviews

Monitoring and managing the reviews that you or your firm gets is one of the most important parts of reputation management. Knowing how to react, such as how to respond to Google reviews, is also just as important. As a matter of fact, industry leaders respond to reviews almost 8 times faster than the rest of the legal industry. This shows that you value client feedback and are committed to improvement.

2. Create Quality Content

Creating quality content is a great way to establish yourself or your firm as experts in your area or in your specific discipline. This can build client trust and drive more people to seek out your services when they are in need. Here are some ideas of content you could create:

  • Legal Guides and How-Tos: Write comprehensive guides on common legal issues that potential clients might face. For example, a post titled “How to File for Divorce in [Your State]” can attract clients looking for information and position the firm as an expert in family law.
  • Dedicated Help Section: Create a section on your website where clients can access resources like downloadable forms, legal checklists, or links to important legal information. This demonstrates that your firm is client-centric and committed to helping.
  • Achievements and Awards: Issue press releases about significant firm achievements, such as awards, new hires, or major case wins. This helps to build credibility and public awareness.

Creating content that will be useful to prospective clients and current clients is a great way to increase your brand equity and overall reputation. 

3. Utilize Local SEO

Did you know that 92% of people looking to hire a lawyer or law firm used Google as their primary source? To drive those people to your website, you will need a strong local SEO presence to make sure your law firm ranks well on search engines. Local SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to appear in local search results when people in your geographical area search for legal services.

The legal industry is highly location-specific. Clients typically seek lawyers in their immediate area due to convenience and the need for attorneys well-versed in local laws and regulations. When someone searches for “personal injury lawyer near me” or “best family lawyer in [city],” Google’s algorithm prioritizes delivering geographically relevant results. If your firm isn’t optimized for local SEO, you risk missing out on these critical opportunities.

Local SEO helps your firm appear in the top positions for these local search queries, increasing your visibility to nearby potential clients. This means more traffic to your website, more leads, and ultimately, more clients walking through your door.

4. Engage with Social Media

While it may not be common for law firms to do, the importance of social media marketing cannot be understated. With more people using social media to research products, services, and even professionals like lawyers, maintaining an active presence can help you attract potential clients and network with industry professionals. Do your best to actively engage with your audience on platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook.  

When utilized strategically, social media allows law firms to humanize their brand, share valuable insights, and engage with the community in a way that fosters long-term relationships. The more consistently you engage, the more opportunities you create to stay top-of-mind when potential clients need legal services.

5. Hire Professional PR Services

Lawyers and law firms often find themselves in the spotlight, whether for high-profile cases, contentious legal decisions, or public disputes. This exposure makes the legal industry particularly vulnerable to negative media coverage, which can quickly damage a firm’s reputation and credibility. This is exactly why having a PR team can be so valuable for law firm reputation management. 

PR professionals specialize in managing your public image and ensuring that your firm is consistently portrayed in a positive light while minimizing the risk of bad press. They can also proactively craft strategic messaging that highlights your firm’s successes and contributions to the community. Additionally, they act as a buffer between you and the media, carefully managing communications and ensuring that sensitive issues are handled with care to prevent further negative coverage.

REPORT

Legal Services Reputation Benchmarks Report 2024

InMoment’s 2024 Legal Services Online Reputation Benchmarks Report provides a top-level view of the state of reviews today for the legal industry — and how these reviews reflect the experiences clients want to have. The benchmarks serve as a valuable tool for organizations looking to assess their reputational performance, set goals, make informed decisions, and drive continuous customer experience improvement.

Download the Report

Improve Your Lawyer Reputation Management with InMoment

InMoment’s platform can help you set up, manage, and improve your lawyer reputation management strategies. If you are ready to see what InMoment can do for you, schedule a reputation management demo today!

References 

ilawyermarketing. What digital sources do consumers use to conduct research on law firms in 2024? (https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/what-digital-sources-do-consumers-use-to-conduct-research-on-law-firms-in-2024/). Accessed 8/13/2024.

Customer Experience ROI: Calculate the Real Value

Understanding the returns of customer experience (CX) programs is crucial for any business looking to grow. Let’s go over the importance of CX ROI, key metrics to track, and how to prove its value to leadership.
Two business people sitting at a table and looking at a computer.

What is the ROI of Customer Experience?

Customer Experience ROI is a critical metric that measures the financial impact of enhancing customer experiences. By improving customer interactions, businesses can see tangible benefits like increased sales, improved retention, and heightened customer loyalty. These benefits, when translated into financial metrics, help justify investments in these customer experience initiatives.

Despite the ROI being able to calculate (just check out our handy ROI calculator a bit further down the page!), there’s a caveat: it’s notoriously difficult to prove. 

Why is CX ROI Difficult to Prove?

Proving the ROI of customer experience (CX) is challenging for several reasons:

  1. Intangible Benefits: Many benefits of a positive customer experience, such as increased customer loyalty, brand reputation, and customer satisfaction, are intangible and difficult to quantify directly in monetary terms.
  2. Long-Term Impact: The effects of improved CX often manifest over the long term, making it hard to directly link short-term financial performance with CX initiatives. For example, a great customer experience might not immediately result in increased revenue but could lead to sustained customer loyalty and higher lifetime value over time.
  3. Complex Customer Journeys: Customers interact with brands across multiple channels and touchpoints, making it challenging to attribute a specific financial outcome to a single CX initiative. The interconnected nature of these interactions complicates tracking and measuring their direct impact on revenue.
  4. Multiple Influencing Factors: Business performance is influenced by numerous factors beyond customer experience, such as market conditions, competitive actions, and internal operations. Isolating the impact of CX from these other variables can be difficult.
  5. Data and Measurement Challenges: Accurately measuring the ROI of CX requires comprehensive data collection and advanced analytics. Many organizations lack the necessary tools, infrastructure, or expertise to capture and analyze the data needed to quantify CX impact effectively.
  6. Subjective Metrics: CX often relies on subjective metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS). While these metrics provide valuable insights, translating them into financial outcomes or ROI can be challenging.

Because of these factors, demonstrating the financial return on CX investments requires a nuanced approach that combines qualitative and quantitative analysis, along with a deep understanding of the broader business context.

Why is Customer Experience ROI So Important?

Investing in customer experience isn’t just about making customers happy—it’s about driving substantial business growth. Key growth factors include customer retention and loyalty, revenue expansion, cost efficiency, brand differentiation, innovation, and sustainable long-term development. As a result, ROI becomes a crucial metric in customer experience metrics for any business focused on achieving lasting success. Consider these key ROI statistics for businesses that focus on customer experience:

  • Businesses that prioritize customer experience grow their revenue 1.7 times faster than those that don’t.
  • On average, companies focusing on CX see a 2.3 times increase in customer lifetime value.
  • 66% of businesses prioritizing CX report increased retention, while 60% see a boost in customer lifetime value.
  • Customer experience leaders achieve a 307% return on their stock performance, significantly outperforming the S&P 500 Index.

Moreover, businesses that prioritize customer experience invest heavily in it, with an average of 12 dedicated budget lines. Measuring the success of CX initiatives and sharing insights with your team and leadership is vital to continually improving and achieving these results.

How to Measure the ROI of CX?

Measuring the ROI of customer experience can be challenging and cumbersome. It involves tracking several key metrics that reflect the effectiveness of your CX strategies. A few crucial metrics you’ll want to account for before and after your efforts include:

  • CX Objective: Based on your CX strategy, what was the metric that you were trying to improve that closely correlates to your business goals?
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total worth of a customer over the entire relationship.
  • Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a given period.
  • Cost of Support: The expenses associated with providing customer support.
  • Average Transaction Size: The average amount of money spent by a customer per transaction.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): A measure of customer loyalty based on their likelihood to recommend your brand.
  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): A measure of how satisfied customers are with your products or services.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES): A measure of the ease with which customers can interact with your business.

Linking these metrics to financial outcomes can provide a clear picture of your CX ROI. Therefore, after you have gathered all your data from your customer experience strategy, here’s one basic way you can measure your CX ROI:

  1. Compare the financial gains to the cost of support by subtracting the total cost of your CX initiatives from the benefits gained. This should give you the net financial impact of your CX efforts.
    Net Gain = Total Financial Gained – Cost of Support
    For example, if you invested $50,000 into a CX initiative and the total financial gain was $100,000, that leaves you a net gain of $50,000.  
  2. To calculate the ROI, you can take the total net gain divided by the total CX investment costs, then multiply it by 100 to get your percentage.
    CX ROI = (Net Gain from CX Strategy / Total CX Investments Costs) x 100
    This percentage shows how much return you’re getting for every dollar spent on the customer experience.  For example, taking the example from step 1, you’ll want to divide $50,000 by $50,000 and multiply by 100, your CX ROI is 100%. This percentage shows how much return you’re getting for every dollar spent on the customer experience. 

However, many other factors can influence the ROI of your customer experience including industry benchmarks and standards, numbers of promoters, contact center experience, and more. Therefore, InMoment has created an in-depth CX ROI calculator that allows you to easily enter your own data. Our calculator can help quantify these metrics and track your progress over time.

Check out the handy calculator here! Want to see the entire suite of calculators? Visit our CX ROI calculator page, here.

Calculate your business’ ROI using InMoment’s VoC tools.

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Total ICX ROI

How to Prove CX ROI to Leadership?

To gain executive buy-in for customer experience initiatives, it’s crucial to clearly demonstrate how these efforts translate into measurable business growth. Start by establishing a direct correlation between CX improvements and key financial outcomes such as increased sales, higher customer retention rates, and a greater volume of transactions.

Data-Driven Storytelling

One effective approach is to create a compelling narrative supported by data. For example, if you’ve enhanced your Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 10 points and subsequently experienced a 5% increase in customer retention, this direct correlation can be powerful evidence of the ROI of your CX efforts. Presenting these kinds of data points helps leadership see beyond the abstract value of customer satisfaction and focus on the concrete financial benefits.

Build a Comprehensive ROI Model for CX Initiatives

In addition, consider building a comprehensive ROI model that ties specific CX initiatives to business outcomes. This model can include a variety of metrics, such as customer lifetime value (CLV), reduction in churn rate, and cost savings from improved operational efficiency. By demonstrating how these metrics align with broader business goals, you make it easier for leadership to justify continued investment in customer experience initiatives.

Track Long-Term Metrics for Sustained Reporting

Also, don’t forget to emphasize the importance of tracking these metrics over time. Consistently showing how CX improvements drive long-term growth will help not only secure initial investment but also maintain ongoing support. Leadership is more likely to support initiatives that show sustained, quantifiable returns.

Additional Tip: Consider sharing competitor benchmarks and industry trends to drive home the importance of your CX initiatives. 

Real-Life Examples of Customer Experience ROI

Foot Locker

Foot Locker has always put the customer at the center of everything they do, gathering feedback across various channels such as email, call center logs, and social media. However, the vast amount of data collected posed challenges, including:

  • Inconsistent Data Categorization: Difficulty in automatically categorizing documents using a common taxonomy.
  • Fragmented Feedback Sources: Lack of a uniform view of feedback data from different channels.
  • Limited Analytics Visibility: Inability to understand or modify system-generated results easily.

To overcome these obstacles, Foot Locker partnered with InMoment, leveraging our Spotlight tool. This solution allowed them to:

  • Centralize Feedback Streams: Consolidate all feedback into a single platform for uniform analysis.
  • Automate Categorization: Use a universal taxonomy to efficiently capture and track key insights.
  • Enhance Data Transparency: Easily adjust analytics to meet changing needs, ensuring accurate and actionable data.

With these improvements, Foot Locker can now proactively address negative retail customer experiences, reduce churn, and enhance overall business outcomes, solidifying their leadership in the sneaker retail market.

America’s Larget Cable and Home Internet Provider

To reduce customer churn, a telecom giant partnered with InMoment to identify at-risk customers and promptly address their concerns. InMoment’s customer listening technology was implemented in regional care centers to immediately collect customer feedback after each interaction. When customers give negative responses, they are offered the chance to speak with a manager. Real-time alerts notify managers of callback requests, leading to 1,000 recovery opportunities monthly. With each customer worth an average of $1,920 annually, this approach identified $23 million in annual revenue by retaining dissatisfied customers.

North American Fast Casual Giant

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

Tesco

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

TELUS

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

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

These real-world examples clearly illustrate the significant impact that a strategic investment in customer experience can have on a company’s bottom line. By leveraging advanced tools and methodologies, businesses like Foot Locker, TELUS, and others have not only improved customer satisfaction but also unlocked substantial financial returns. Whether through reducing churn, increasing customer loyalty, or driving revenue growth, the ROI of a customer-centric approach is both measurable and compelling. Investing in customer experience is not just a good business practice—it’s a critical driver of sustainable success.

Mistakes to Avoid When Measuring CX ROI

When measuring the ROI of customer experience, it’s essential to steer clear of common pitfalls that can undermine the accuracy and effectiveness of your analysis:

  • Focusing on Short-Term Metrics: CX improvements often require time to manifest in financial outcomes. It’s important to maintain a long-term perspective and avoid dismissing initiatives that don’t show immediate results. Patience is key to seeing the full impact of CX investments.
  • Ignoring Customer Feedback: Customer feedback is a goldmine of insights for identifying areas where CX can be improved. Neglecting this feedback not only risks missing out on valuable information but can also lead to misguided investments in areas that don’t resonate with your customers.
  • Not Considering Employee Experience: The link between employee experience and customer experience is strong. Happy, engaged employees are more likely to deliver better customer service, leading to improved CX. Ignoring this connection can result in missed opportunities to enhance both employee and customer satisfaction.
  • Overlooking the Full Customer Journey: CX is not confined to a single touchpoint; it spans the entire customer journey. Ensure that your measurement efforts consider every interaction a customer has with your brand, from awareness to post-purchase support.

By avoiding these common mistakes and focusing on a holistic, data-driven approach to measuring CX ROI, you’ll be well-positioned to present a compelling case to leadership. This will help you secure the necessary resources to kickstart your CX program and demonstrate the ongoing value of these initiatives as your program evolves.

See ROI in Half the Time with InMoment

At InMoment, we understand the challenges of demonstrating ROI from customer experience initiatives. That’s why our integrated customer experience program is designed to help you see ROI in half the time. By honing in on the metrics that truly matter and leveraging our advanced analytics tools, we empower your business to transform customer experience into a powerful driver of growth. 

Whether you’re just starting your CX journey or looking to advance an existing program, InMoment provides the insights and support you need to achieve measurable, impactful results. If you’re ready to see what we can do to supercharge your business, schedule a CX demo with us today!

References 

HubSpot. Customer Experience ROI: How to Convince Leadership It’s Worth It. (https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-experience-roi) Accessed 8/16/24. 

Why A Digital Adoption Strategy Is Crucial for Business Success

A digital adoption strategy is a plan that ensures the effective implementation of new technologies or processes. Digital adoption strategies are important to sustain and grow business success.
Shot of a group of young business people having a brainstorming session in a modern office

As the number of consumers making their purchases online has grown exponentially in recent years, it is no surprise that over 80% of marketing leaders have chosen to invest their resources in digital channels. 

However, as businesses try to adopt digital business strategies, most aren’t finding success. Research shows that 70% of digital deployments fail to meet their goals. This can be because of a lack of strategy, organizational resistance, poor change management, or any other number of reasons. 

If your organization is transitioning to a more digital-first approach or is adding a digital channel to your existing operations, you will need a digital adoption strategy to succeed. 

What Is A Digital Adoption Strategy?

A digital adoption strategy is a structured plan designed to ensure that new technologies, software, or digital processes are effectively implemented and fully utilized within an organization. This includes helping employees, stakeholders, or customers learn and integrate the technology into their daily workflows. 

Benefits of An Effective Digital Adoption Strategy

A well-executed digital adoption strategy can benefit your organization in many ways. These benefits will not only make your organization more profitable, but they will also improve customer metrics such as customer satisfaction. Here are some of the benefits you can expect from a well-planned digital adoption strategy:

Improved Efficiency & Reduced Costs

One of the most significant advantages of a well-executed digital adoption strategy is its ability to boost operational efficiency while reducing costs. When employees fully understand and utilize new technologies, repetitive manual tasks can be automated, workflows streamlined, and decision-making accelerated.

This leads to a reduction in errors, faster completion of tasks, and more effective resource allocation. Additionally, businesses save on overheads like labor and operational expenses as digital solutions take on more responsibilities such as optimizing productivity and trimming excess costs. In the long term, these efficiencies drive down the total cost of ownership for technology investments.

Improved Customer Experience

Another key outcome of digital adoption is a vastly improved customer experience. When digital tools are integrated into customer-facing processes, such as service delivery, communication channels, and support systems, businesses can offer faster, more personalized, and consistent interactions. 

Digital adoption enhances the ability to track and anticipate customer needs, resolve issues quickly, and provide seamless omnichannel experiences. This results in increased customer experience metrics and better positioning against competitors. 

Increased Regulatory Compliance

Digital tools can also play a critical role in helping organizations maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards. An effective digital adoption strategy ensures that employees are properly trained to use systems that automatically capture, track, and store data in line with regulatory requirements. 

Automation of compliance tasks, such as data encryption, audit trails, and reporting, reduces the risk of human error and improves the organization’s ability to demonstrate compliance during audits. This not only mitigates the risk of costly fines and reputational damage but also strengthens trust with customers and partners who value data security and adherence to legal standards.

When To Create A Digital Adoption Strategy

There are many different reasons that your business may undergo digital transformation. You may be changing your business model to accommodate to an increasing number of online consumers, or launching new digital products. Regardless, here are some common problems businesses face that may indicate a need to create a digital adoption strategy: 

Scaling Operations

As businesses grow and scale, processes that once worked in a smaller setting may become inefficient. Scaling often requires the introduction of more advanced digital tools to manage larger volumes of data, customers, or tasks. A digital adoption strategy ensures that as new technologies are introduced to support growth, they are adopted smoothly by your team and fit well into your scaled operations without disruptions.

Merging or Acquiring Businesses

Mergers and acquisitions often lead to a consolidation of systems, platforms, and processes. In such cases, a digital adoption strategy is necessary to ensure that teams across the newly formed organization are aligned and comfortable with the adopted tools. The strategy can help bridge gaps between different organizational cultures, technology stacks, and ways of working, leading to a smoother integration.

Experiencing Low Technology Utilization

If you’ve already invested in digital tools but are seeing low utilization rates, it’s time to introduce or revisit a digital adoption strategy. Poor engagement with technology is a clear sign that employees or customers are either unaware of its capabilities or face challenges using it. A strategy focused on training, support, and cultural shifts can reinvigorate interest and ensure that your investment yields better results.

If you are looking to build your digital adoption strategy, consider choosing InMoment as your partner. InMoment’s platform is proven to combine expert services with award-winning technology to provide you with a solution that will give you the fastest ROI, according to the G2 Crowd Report. 

How to Implement A Digital Adoption Strategy

Implementing a digital adoption strategy involves several key steps that ensure technology is not only deployed but also embraced and optimized throughout the organization. Here’s an overview of how to effectively implement your strategy:

Opportunity Identification

The first step in implementing a digital adoption strategy is identifying opportunities where digital solutions can create the most impact. This can be done by looking at your customer journey map and identifying any friction points that occur. Starting with a good understanding of the customers’ omnichannel journey is the first step in identifying where to invest in digital solutions.

Prioritization

Not all opportunities are created equal, so once opportunities are identified, prioritize them based on their potential impact and feasibility. This can be done by using impact prediction tools that show you which opportunities will affect your business the most. Additionally, consider the level of change required; initiatives with minimal disruption may be prioritized over more complex projects to gain early wins and build momentum.

Business drivers such as sales promotions and responsiveness ranked by importance.

UX and Product Testing

User experience (UX) is a critical factor in successful digital adoption. Before fully rolling out new technologies, conduct thorough UX and product testing with actual end users—whether they be employees, customers, or both. During this phase, gather feedback on the usability, interface design, and overall functionality of the digital tools.

By identifying and addressing issues early, you can tailor the technology to better meet users’ needs and reduce resistance to adoption. This testing phase also allows you to optimize workflows, minimize learning curves, and ensure that the technology enhances rather than hinders productivity.

Change Management

Implementing a digital adoption strategy requires more than just rolling out new tools; it demands effective change management to ensure that people are prepared, supported, and engaged throughout the transition. A strong change management plan includes:

  • Communication: Communicate the goals, benefits, and expected outcomes of the digital initiative. Employees need to understand why the change is happening and how it will benefit them.
  • Training and Support: Provide tailored training programs that meet the needs of different user groups, ensuring they are comfortable with the new tools. Offer continuous support, such as on-demand help resources, tutorials, or peer networks.
  • Leadership Buy-In: Engage leadership to act as champions for the initiative. Visible commitment from top management helps drive adoption and reinforce the importance of the changes.

By managing the human side of change effectively, you can increase buy-in, reduce resistance, and smooth the transition to new digital tools.

Ongoing Monitoring

Once your digital adoption strategy has been implemented, it is important to have established mechanisms for customers and employees to provide feedback. Ongoing monitoring allows you to identify and address issues early, optimize the technology’s performance, and make adjustments to training or support as needed. 

InMoment’s CX Services ensures that you have a partner every step of the way when implementing your digital adoption strategy. When you utilize InMoment’s platform, you also get access to decades of experience in CX implementation and improvement. Our services, which are never outsourced, will provide you with a deeper understanding of your program for the lowest cost of ownership.   

Your Digital Adoption Strategy from InMoment

Do you need to undergo a digital transformation, but aren’t exactly sure where to start? InMoment has created a digital transformation roadmap to help you create successful digital experiences in your organization. If you would like to see more about InMoment’s best-in-class platform and how it can assist your digital transformation, schedule a demo today!

References 

Boston Consulting Group. Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success. (https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation). Accessed 8/15/2024. 

Hostinger. 44 Key Digital Marketing Statistics for Strategic Growth in 2024. (https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/digital-marketing-statistics). Accessed 8/15/2024. 

How AI Customer Feedback Can Revolutionize Customer Experience

AI customer feedback encompasses using artificial intelligence to help businesses make sense of customer feedback. Doing so allows business to gain a more holistic view of the customer experience.
Three business people talking around a table

Unlock the full potential of your customer feedback with InMoment’s AI-powered solutions. Discover how advanced AI technology can transform raw data into actionable insights, driving informed decisions and improving customer satisfaction.

What Is AI Customer Feedback?

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, understanding customer sentiment and feedback is more critical than ever. AI customer feedback involves leveraging artificial intelligence to collect, analyze, and interpret customer feedback data. By employing advanced algorithms and machine learning models, businesses can gain deeper insights into their customers’ experiences and needs, transforming raw feedback into actionable intelligence.

Example of Using AI in Customer Feedback

One example of using AI in customer feedback is sentiment analysis. By leveraging natural language processing (NLP), AI can analyze customer reviews, social media posts, and support tickets to determine the overall sentiment—positive, negative, or neutral. For instance, a company can use AI to sift through thousands of customer reviews on an e-commerce platform to gauge product satisfaction and identify common complaints.

An example of AI customer feedback processing in a contact center.

What are the Benefits of AI for Customer Feedback?

Implementing AI-enhanced customer feedback analysis offers numerous advantages for businesses: 

  • Enhanced Accuracy and Speed: AI algorithms can process vast amounts of data much faster and more accurately than human analysts. This speed and precision ensure that businesses receive timely and reliable insights.
  • Deeper Insights: AI can uncover hidden trends and patterns in customer feedback that traditional methods might miss. This deeper understanding helps businesses make more informed decisions and tailor their strategies to meet customer needs.
  • Cost Efficiency: Automating the feedback analysis process reduces the need for manual labor, resulting in cost savings for businesses. AI tools can handle repetitive tasks, allowing human employees to focus on more strategic initiatives.
  • Scalability: AI systems can handle growing amounts of data without compromising performance.

How Does Using AI Work for Customer Feedback?

The process of using AI for customer feedback typically involves these steps:

  1. Data Collection: Gathering structured and unstructured feedback from various channels, including surveys, social media, emails, and more using customer feedback AI tools.
  2. Natural Language Processing (NLP): Using NLP to understand and interpret text data, detecting sentiment, intent, and key themes.
  3. Predictive Analytics: Employing predictive models to identify potential future trends and outcomes based on historical data.
  4. Generative AI: Utilizing AI to generate meaningful responses and prompts, encouraging richer customer feedback.
  5. Integration: Combining feedback with other data sources for a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Use Cases of AI Customer Feedback

AI-driven feedback analysis helps companies understand customer preferences and pain points, informing product development and enhancement. This can be particularly beneficial across various industries, leading to more customer-centric products and services.

Restaurants

Restaurants can leverage AI to analyze customer feedback from review sites, social media, and direct feedback forms. For example, a restaurant chain might use AI to identify that customers frequently mention slow service during peak hours. By addressing this feedback, perhaps by hiring more staff or improving kitchen processes, the restaurant can boost customer satisfaction and increase repeat business. Generative AI Prompts, like our Active Listening™ bot, can elicit more valuable responses, while AI-generated responses simplify the task of closing the feedback loop.

AI being used to search photos for certain objects.

Retail

Retailers can leverage AI to analyze customer feedback from multiple channels, including online reviews, social media, and in-store surveys. For instance, a retail chain might discover that customers are frustrated with long checkout lines. By addressing this issue, perhaps through self-checkout options, the retailer can enhance the shopping experience. InMoment Conversational Intelligence feature helps understand customer interactions to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction. Additionally, AI-generated responses can address customer concerns promptly.

AI generating responses to Google reviews.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers can employ AI to analyze feedback from customers about their products. For example, an electronics manufacturer might use AI to find out that customers often mention battery life issues in their reviews. The company can then focus on improving battery technology in future product iterations. Predictive Analytics can guide these enhancements by highlighting key areas of concern, while our Smart Summary feature transforms detailed feedback into concise, actionable insights.

Finance

AI can analyze customer feedback from banking apps, online banking services, and customer service interactions to identify common issues such as transaction errors or poor user experiences. For example, a bank might use AI to discover that customers frequently complain about the complexity of their online loan application process. By addressing this issue, the bank can improve customer satisfaction and increase loan approvals. InMoment’s emotion and effort detection feature automatically identifies the intentions and emotions behind feedback, providing deeper insights for improvements.

Healthcare

In healthcare, AI can process patient feedback from surveys, online reviews, and social media to identify areas needing improvement. For example, a hospital might use AI to detect recurring complaints about long waiting times or the quality of care. This insight can lead to operational changes that enhance patient experience and care quality. Generative AI prompts can elicit more valuable patient feedback for better analysis.

Hospitality

Hotels and resorts can use AI to analyze guest reviews and feedback forms to identify strengths and weaknesses in their services. A hotel chain might discover through AI that guests frequently mention the need for better room cleanliness. By addressing this feedback, the hotel can improve guest satisfaction and loyalty. AI customer feedback analysis can provide detailed insights into guest experiences, allowing for targeted improvements.

What to Look for in a Customer Feedback AI Tool?

When selecting an AI customer feedback analysis tool, consider the following factors:

  • Data integration capabilities: Ensure the tool can process data from multiple sources.
  • Customizability: Look for a solution that offers flexible data input and customizable reporting options.
  • Accuracy and reliability: Evaluate the tool’s performance in sentiment analysis and trend detection.
  • Real-Time Analytics: The ability to provide immediate insights and actionable recommendations.
  • User-friendly interface: Choose a tool that presents insights in an easily understandable format.
  • Scalability: Ensure the tool can grow with your business and handle increasing data volumes.
  • Security and compliance: Verify that the tool adheres to data protection regulations.
  • Reporting features: Look for robust reporting capabilities to share insights across your organization.

How to Get Started with a Customer Feedback AI Tool?

Getting started with a customer feedback AI tool involves:

  1. Assessing Your Needs: Identify your specific goals and requirements for customer feedback analysis.
  2. Choosing the Right Tool: Select a tool that aligns with your needs and offers the features you require.
  3. Implementing the Tool: Integrate the tool with your existing systems and begin collecting feedback.
  4. Training Your Team: Ensure your team is well-versed in using the tool and interpreting the insights it provides.
  5. Monitoring and Adjusting: Continuously monitor the tool’s performance and make adjustments as needed to optimize results.

Partner with InMoment for AI Customer Feedback Needs

InMoment offers a comprehensive suite of AI-powered customer feedback solutions designed to enhance your CX program. Our predictive customer analytics capabilities take the guesswork out of understanding your customers’ needs, allowing you to focus on driving meaningful change. Key Features of InMoment’s AI Customer Feedback Solutions:

  • Generative AI Prompts: Our Active Listening™ bot uses real-time text analytics and generative AI to elicit more valuable responses from customers.
  • Conversational Analytics: Understand interactions between service agents and customers to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction.
  • Smart Summary: Our generative AI Large Language Model technology transforms individual feedback into concise, actionable insights.
  • Image Analysis: Convert images into qualitative insights for product, service, and CX improvements.
  • Predictive Analytics: Analyze the impact of key drivers on metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES to inform strategic decisions.
  • Emotion and Effort Detection: Automatically detect intentions, effort, and emotions behind every piece of feedback.
  • Machine Learning: Discover new trends and topics as they emerge in customer feedback.
  • AI-Generated Responses: Simplify responses with AI-generated replies, saving time and effort.
  • Automated Actions: Close the feedback loop with automated actions based on AI-driven categorization.

Learn more about our customer experience platform and how our AI-based customer feedback solutions can transform your business and help you stay ahead of the competition.

The Rundown on Conversation Intelligence Software

Conversation intelligence software helps businesses manage their customer feedback by analyzing conversations from various communication channels.
Two call center agents using conversation intelligence software

What is Conversation Intelligence Software?

Conversation intelligence software represents platforms with conversation intelligence capabilities to analyze conversations from various communication channels. This includes phone calls, emails, chat messages, and social media interactions. This software can extract valuable insights from these conversations by leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms. 

Why is Conversation Intelligence Software Important?

Conversation intelligence software is important because it will help your business stay competitive and solve your customers’ problems faster. A majority of companies have already deployed conversation intelligence solutions in their customer experience. Of those companies, 90% have reported faster issue resolution. Moreover, 80% of those companies have reported higher call volume processing utilizing AI solutions. 

Conversation intelligence software can increase your organization’s customer satisfaction while also increasing employee productivity. By adopting this technology, companies can stay ahead of the competition, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve their operations. Conversation intelligence software is a critical tool for success in a world where every interaction counts.

Call Tracking Software vs. Conversation Intelligence Software

While both call-tracking software and conversation intelligence software play vital roles in managing and analyzing customer interactions, they serve different purposes and offer distinct functionalities. Understanding the differences between these two types of software is crucial for businesses looking to optimize their communication strategies.

Call tracking software is designed primarily to track and attribute phone calls to specific marketing campaigns or sources. Its main purpose is to help businesses understand which marketing efforts are driving inbound calls and how effective these campaigns are in generating leads.

Conversation intelligence software goes beyond simply tracking calls. It leverages artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze the content of conversations, whether they occur via phone, email, chat, or social media. The goal is to extract qualitative insights such as customer sentiment that can improve customer interactions and overall business performance.

Who Uses Conversation Intelligence Software?

Conversation intelligence software can be utilized by multiple teams in an organization to meet their specific needs. Whether sales teams are looking to boost conversion rates or customer support centers are trying to enhance customer satisfaction, here are examples of teams in your organization that can utilize this technology: 

Sales Teams

Sales teams are among the primary beneficiaries of conversation intelligence software. By analyzing sales calls and interactions, these teams can identify the strategies that work best in closing deals, uncover common objections, and refine their sales pitch to resonate more effectively with prospects. 

Sales managers can also use this data to monitor performance, coach their teams more effectively, and scale successful practices across the organization. This results in higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and more targeted, successful sales efforts.

Contact Centers

Conversation intelligence software can be extremely useful for contact centers, specifically for contact center optimization. It enables support agents to analyze past interactions to better understand customer issues and identify the root causes of recurring problems. The software’s sentiment analysis feature helps agents gauge the emotional tone of conversations, allowing them to respond with the appropriate level of empathy and urgency. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and a more positive brand reputation.

Marketing Departments

Marketing teams can use conversation intelligence software to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences. By analyzing customer interactions across various channels, marketers can identify trends, track the effectiveness of campaigns, and understand the language and messaging that resonate most with their audience. This data-driven approach allows for more targeted marketing strategies, improved messaging, and better-aligned content that speaks directly to customer needs. 

Features to Look For In Conversation Intelligence Software

When selecting conversation intelligence software for your business, it’s essential to choose a solution that aligns with your specific needs and objectives. Here are the key features to look for when evaluating conversation intelligence software: 

1. Conversation Analytics

Conversational analytics allows businesses to pull insights from conversations with customers. Unlike basic transcription or keyword tracking, conversational analytics goes deeper by analyzing the context, sentiment, and flow of these interactions. This feature is particularly useful in understanding the full scope of a conversation, as it captures not just what was said, but how and why it was said. By threading conversations together, businesses can see the progression of a customer’s issue or inquiry, how it was handled over time, and whether the resolution met the customer’s expectations.

A conversation between a customer and contact center agent with highlighted insights.

2. Text Analytics

The best conversational intelligence solutions will also include text analysis software. Text analytics is different from conversation analytics because it makes sense of the vast amounts of unstructured data generated by customer interactions. Traditional data analysis methods often fall short when it comes to understanding the nuances of text-based communication, where the meaning can be heavily context-dependent. However, text analytics leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to unlock the hidden value within this data. 

This feature allows businesses to automatically detect recurring themes, trends, and anomalies in customer feedback, whether it’s through emails, chat messages, social media posts, or other text-based channels. By identifying these patterns, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiments, pain points, and emerging needs. Additionally, the ability to spot anomalies—such as a sudden spike in negative feedback or a recurring issue that has gone unnoticed—enables businesses to proactively address potential problems before they escalate.

A text analysis dashboard highlighting top issues for an online retail store.

3. Agent & Manager Scorecards

Agent and coach scorecards are invaluable tools for businesses aiming to optimize the performance of their customer-facing teams. These scorecards provide a comprehensive view of individual agent and team performance, offering insights into both strengths and areas that need improvement. By using metrics derived from conversation analytics and AI-driven text analysis, scorecards can objectively evaluate how well agents are handling customer interactions, including their ability to resolve issues, maintain a positive tone, and adhere to company protocols. 

For managers and coaches, these scorecards are essential for identifying top performers as well as those who may require additional training or support. The detailed performance data also enables more personalized coaching, where feedback is tailored to the specific needs and challenges of each agent. Over time, this leads to a more engaged, motivated workforce.

Two contact center dashboards. One for agents, and one for managers.

4. Impact Prediction

Impact prediction is a feature that will allow organizations to see what is affecting their main metrics the most. By analyzing historical data and using predictive analytics, this feature can forecast the potential outcomes of different actions and strategies. For example, it can predict how changes in agent behavior, communication strategies, or customer engagement practices might impact customer satisfaction scores, sales conversion rates, or operational efficiency. This insight is crucial for businesses looking to prioritize their efforts and resources effectively.

A dashboard showing the biggest impact to main business metrics.

5. Strategic Services

When evaluating conversation intelligence software, you may choose a solution that comes with with expert guidance and tailored reporting on their most critical business questions and drivers. These services are typically delivered by experienced professionals who specialize in conversation intelligence and data analytics. They work closely with businesses to understand their unique challenges, goals, and operational context, and then provide customized insights and recommendations.

Executive advice on how to improve business performance.

Choosing the right conversation intelligence software is a critical decision that can significantly impact your business’s ability to understand and engage with customers effectively. By prioritizing features like real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, integration capabilities, and AI-powered insights, you can select a solution that not only meets your current needs but also supports your long-term growth and success.

How to Purchase Conversation Intelligence Software

Investing in conversation intelligence software is a strategic decision that can significantly enhance your business’s ability to understand and engage with customers. However, purchasing the right solution requires careful consideration of your unique needs, budget, and long-term goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you navigate the process of selecting and purchasing conversation intelligence software:

1. Assess Your Business Needs 

Before diving into the market, take the time to thoroughly assess your business needs. Identify the specific problems you want the software to solve. Consider which teams will use the software and what features are most important to them. 

For example, a sales team may prioritize real-time analytics and AI-driven insights, while a compliance team might focus on robust monitoring and reporting capabilities. Clearly defining your needs will help you narrow down your options and choose a solution that aligns with your business objectives.

2. Research Available Solutions

Once you have a clear understanding of your requirements, start researching the available conversation intelligence software solutions on the market. Look for products that offer the features and capabilities that meet your needs. To get a sense of how solutions platforms perform, read reviews, case studies or third-party reports such as Forrester Wave for text analytics

3. Request Demos and Trials

After narrowing down your options, request demos or free trials of the conversation intelligence software you’re considering. This hands-on experience will allow you to see the software in action, explore its interface, and assess its ease of use. 

Pay attention to how intuitive the software is for your team members and whether it integrates seamlessly with your existing systems, such as CRM or call center software. During this trial period, involve the key stakeholders from different departments to gather their feedback and ensure the software meets their specific needs. 

4. Evaluate Costs and ROI

Understanding the costs associated with conversation intelligence software is crucial for making an informed purchase decision. Evaluate the pricing models offered by different vendors—some may charge based on the number of users, the volume of conversations analyzed, or specific features included. Be sure to factor in any additional costs for implementation, training, and ongoing support.

While cost is an important consideration, focus on the potential return on investment the software can provide. A higher initial investment may be justified if the software delivers significant improvements in customer satisfaction, sales performance, or operational efficiency. To see the ROI you can get from InMoment’s platform, check out our ROI calculator!

5. Make the Purchase and Plan the Rollout

Once you’ve selected the conversation intelligence software that best fits your needs, finalize the purchase and work with the vendor to plan the rollout. Be sure to develop a detailed implementation plan that includes timelines, responsibilities, and milestones to ensure a smooth deployment. 

Involve key stakeholders early in the process and provide adequate training to ensure that everyone is comfortable using the software from day one. Establish clear goals and metrics to measure the software’s impact over time, and be prepared to make adjustments as needed to fully realize its benefits.

Purchasing conversation intelligence software is a significant investment that can transform the way your business engages with customers and drives results. By carefully assessing your needs, researching solutions, evaluating costs, and ensuring strong vendor support, you can choose a software solution that aligns with your business objectives and delivers a strong return on investment. 

Conversation Intelligence Software Trends

The conversation intelligence software market is expected to reach a valuation of $46.8 billion by 2033, more than doubling its 2023 valuation. As the market for this software grows rapidly, it will cause the software itself to grow with it. Here are some of the conversation intelligence software trends to look out for: 

  • Increased data volume processing 
  • Improved language capabilities such as understanding nuances and being able to understand more languages
  • Continued integration of AI and natural language processing technologies 

As businesses continue to prioritize customer experience, personalization, and data security, conversation intelligence software will play an increasingly vital role in helping organizations understand and engage with their customers more effectively. Staying ahead of these trends will be key for businesses looking to leverage this technology to its fullest potential and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Choose InMoment for Your Conversation Intelligence Software

InMoment’s conversation analytics software gives you the ability to understand everything your customers are saying, across every channel. whether it’s through phone calls, emails, chat messages, or social media interactions. By capturing and analyzing conversations in real-time, our software uncovers the true voice of your customers. See how we can help you by scheduling a demo today!

References 

Geneys. MIT Technology Review Insights: How Global Companies Are Winning at AI Deployment. (https://www.genesys.com/blog/post/mit-technology-review-insights-how-global-companies-are-winning-at-ai-deployment). Accessed 8/8/2024. 

PR Newsire. MIT Global Survey: 90% of Companies Deploy Artificial Intelligence in the Customer Journey. (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mit-global-survey-90-of-companies-deploy-artificial-intelligence-in-the-customer-journey-300749927.html). Accessed 8/8/2024. 

Future Market Insights. Conversation Intelligence Software Market. (https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/conversation-intelligence-software-market). Accessed 8/12/2024. 

Customer Experience: An Overview & How to Start

The customer experience represents every interaction a customer has with your business. Creating, measuring, and maintaining a good customer experience is essential for sustained business success.
What is Customer Experience

Think of your favorite clothing brand. Why is that brand your favorite? It is probably because you enjoy their clothes, but also because every time you buy something it is an easy, enjoyable process. The way you feel about that brand is because of the customer experience you have every time you make a purchase. The customer experience you have with a brand will cause you to be a lifelong customer, or never shop there again. 

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer Experience (CX) refers to the overall impression and perception a customer has about a company or brand based on their interactions throughout the entire customer journey. This includes all touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a business, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase, use, and after-sales service.

Customer experience programs refer to an organization’s ongoing efforts to listen to and collect customer feedback, measure customer perceptions of their experiences, and ultimately improve those experiences to encourage positive brand perception and business growth. Customer experience can also be referred to as customer experience management (CXM or CEM).

Why is Customer Experience Important?

Did you know that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a product or service if they have a great customer experience? Also, companies who prioritize the customer experience outperform their competitors who do not. 

The customer experience represents the relationship that consumers have with your organization. Every interaction a customer has with you is important, and curating a great customer experience shows that you value your customer’s time and feedback, and will use it to further improve your organization. 

Focusing on the customer experience will significantly improve your business performance. From increased loyalty and customer lifetime value to decreased churn, the customer experience is key to achieving your goals. Here are some statistics that prove the value of customer experience: 

  • Organizations focused on customer experience realize revenue 1.7x faster than those who do not
  • Customer experience leaders outperform the broader stock market, generating returns that are 108 points higher than the S&P 500 Index
  • Customers with positive experiences are likely to spend 140% more than ones with negative experiences

Where to Begin with Customer Experience?

There are a lot of different reasons why you may be looking to improve your customer experience. It might be because organizations that focus on the customer experience are 60% more profitable than those that don’t, or it might be because you are interested in improving customer retention, satisfaction, or lifetime value. Regardless of your goals, there are steps you can take to build a solid foundation for your future customer experience initiatives. 

1. Map the Customer Journey 

In order to improve the customer experience, you need to make sure you understand the current customer experience that exists in your organization. This can be done by creating a customer journey map. Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool to visualize every touchpoint a customer has with your brand. Customer journey mapping examples can be useful to see how other organizations have visualized their customer experience. This exercise will highlight potential pain points and opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

2. Set Clear CX Goals

Before taking any steps to set up your customer experience program, you will need to meet with the stakeholders within your organization and decide on what you want to achieve. When choosing these goals, try to avoid broad goals such as “improve sales.” Instead, try to make specific, targeted goals such as “improve overall customer satisfaction by 25% over the next year.” Specific goals will help you create a focused strategy, and will also be easier to track success. 

3. Design Your CX Program

Now that you have your goals set, you will need to design your CX program. It is important to do this before reaching out to customers via surveys or asking reviews. That way, when customer feedback does start coming in, you are prepared for it. 

These steps will help you create an effective and long-lasting customer experience program. If you want to learn more about the best way to kickstart your CX efforts, check out our beginner’s guide to launching a customer experience program

How to Measure Customer Experience

There are many different customer experience KPIs on which you can measure the success of your customer experience initiatives. The metrics you choose will depend on what your customer experience goals are. For example. customer satisfaction helps you measure overall satisfaction, while customer effort score measures the ease of which customers interact with your business. 

You should choose the metric that most closely aligns to your CX goals. Once you have chosen the metric that makes the most sense, you will need to get a baseline of where your customer experience metrics stand that you can use to measure for improvement. Here is a brief overview of some of the most common customer experience metrics:

1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) 

The customer satisfaction score assesses the overall satisfaction customers feel with your product, service, or overall experience. This score is typically assessed through a customer satisfaction survey that asks “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?” where respondents answer on a scale from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. 

This metric is best used for gathering immediate feedback on customer satisfaction with specific aspects of the business. A long-term use case would be to identify areas that need improvement and track changes in satisfaction over time.

A CSAT customer experience dashboard from InMoment

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of them recommending your brand to others. It involves asking customers a single question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?” Based on their response, customers are categorized as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), or Detractors (0-6). NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

A CX report showing NPS month-over-month.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score evaluates how easy it is for customers to interact with your business, whether it’s finding information, getting support, or completing a purchase. Customers are asked to rate the ease of their experience on a scale. A common question is: “How easy was it to resolve your issue with our company?” A lower effort score indicates a smoother, more positive customer experience. 

These metrics are important to showing the ROI of your customer experience efforts. They can also be used alongside business growth metrics such as retention rate, repeat purchases, growth in sales, and more to correlate the customer experience improvements with business improvements. 

Building a Customer Experience Strategy

A customer experience strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a company intends to improve and manage customers’ interactions and perceptions of its brand. Often headed by a customer experience manager, these plans encompass all touchpoints across the customer journey and aim to deliver a consistent, positive, and memorable experience. 

Whether you have an established CX program or are just getting started, a customer experience strategy ensures you are making focused decisions on how to improve the things that matter most to your customers and your business. 

If you are just getting started, check out our small CX team checklist to ensure you have everything you need to make the biggest impact to on your customer experience!

Do You Need a Customer Experience Manager?

If your company is new to customer experience, starting with a dedicated customer experience manager is a smart move. This role is crucial for ensuring that all interactions and touchpoints between your company and its customers are positive, consistent, and aligned with your overall CX strategy.

A CX manager serves as the central figure in your customer experience efforts, connecting the dots across different departments—such as frontline employees, sales, marketing, and the executive team. This ensures that the customer experience is cohesive and integrated throughout the organization. Furthermore,  a CX manager can lay the groundwork for a strong customer experience strategy and scale the program as your organization grows.

Should You Invest in Customer Experience Management Software?

Customer experience management software is a set of tools that help you manage, analyze, and improve customer interactions across touchpoints throughout the customer journey. The best customer experience management software will be one that fits your business needs, and can be tailored to your specific goals. 

Customer experience software can be especially useful for CX managers or small CX teams who do not have the resources available to manually gather and analyze data. By automating the collection and analysis of customer data, customer experience software can quickly identify areas needing improvement and help prioritize them based on potential impact. This means you can focus your efforts on the changes that will make the most difference to your customers. 

Customer Experience Examples

A great customer experience can take many forms. But, something that all memorable customer experiences have in common is the ability to put the customer first, no matter what. Here are a few examples of companies that have gone above and beyond to create a customer experience that keeps customers coming back. 

Foot Locker

Foot Locker is one of the most popular sportswear companies in the world. As a result, they, deal with a large volume of customer feedback. Going through this customer feedback manually was time-consuming, and caused important feedback to be missed. As a solution, Foot Locker chose text analysis software that allows them to summarize, analyze, and act on the most important comments from customers. In doing so, they increase customer satisfaction and are able to pinpoint any operational changes that need to be made as a solution for future customers. 

Rural King

Rural King is a farm supply store with locations all over the United States. Rural King’s main form of customer feedback is through online reviews. But, with no way to review every review that was coming in, they were struggling to connect with their customers. To fix this problem, they implemented a review management solution that allowed them to tag keywords, analyze sentiment, and respond to reviews. Furthermore, their solution allows them to create and share dashboards with multiple stakeholders across the organization. 

Both of these organizations have created great customer experiences by putting their customers first and making sure they have the necessary tools to listen to and implement feedback in the most efficient way possible. 

How to Improve the Customer Experience

Some businesses may think that it takes a lot of effort to improve their customer experience, but the truth is that improving your customer experience can be as simple as updating your business hours, or giving customers a discount on their next purchase for leaving a review. No matter where you are in building your customer experience journey, here are some ways you can improve your customer experience. 

Determine what Customers Value Most and Deliver

As you seek to improve your customer experience, gather information on what your current customers value most. You can leverage customer feedback surveys and analyze customer reviews, both good and bad, to determine what your customers are looking for from your company. 

Do your customers want your services to be more convenient? Do they want to know more about the service before they buy or subscribe? Do they have concerns about how their information is used and protected?  Do they want to spend less time on the phone with customer service representatives?

As you discover what it is that your customers are looking for, take steps to deliver it to them.

Let Customers Know Their Opinions Matter

Tell your customers that you’re listening and making changes to improve their experience. Advertise the changes you are making on your website or through social media. You may also want to thank customers for providing feedback and be quick to address any concerns that they express by reaching out to them personally.

Measure Improvements

As you proceed with your CX improvement strategy, measure the response from your customers with relevant metrics. As you keep track of things like conversions, customer complaints, purchases, and website traffic, you’ll be able to figure out which of your efforts are paying off and which are not.

Consider the Digital Experience 

As you work on your customer experience, don’t forget about the digital experience. Making improvements to aspects of the customer experience like your website navigation or automated phone menu options can vastly improve how easily and readily your customers can avail themselves of your services. Convenience and accessibility are large parts of a good customer experience, so be sure not to neglect how technology can help in your overall CX strategy.

Aim for Continuous Improvement 

Even as your improvements take effect, build upon your successes by continuing to analyze and improve your customer experience. Don’t rest on your laurels — in today’s constantly changing world of digital commerce, continuous improvement is needed. 

This is especially true if your customer’s needs start to outpace your current customer experience model — for instance, you might need greater technology capacity to serve larger numbers of customers, or you might break into a niche market that has different needs.

Improve Your Customer Experience with InMoment

InMomet’s best-in-class XI Platform gives your business all the tools you need to create a great customer experience. You can track the metrics that matter to your business, create cases, respond to customer reviews, and more! Everything within the XI Platform ca be customized for you. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment can help you improve your customer experience. 

References 

SuperOffice. 32 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STATISTICS YOU NEED TO KNOW FOR 2024. (https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/). Accessed 7/26/2024. 

Forbes. 6 Things Customer-Centric Companies Do Differently. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2021/08/02/6-things-customer-centric-companies-do-differently/?sh=4c37378165a4). Accessed 8/8/2024. 

Forrester. The Business Impact Of Investing In Experience. (https://business.adobe.com/content/dam/dx/us/en/resources/reports/the-business-impact-of-investing-in-experience-forrester-thought-leadership-paper-2021/the-business-impact-of-investing-in-experience-forrester-thought-leadership-paper-2021.pdf). Accessed 8/8/2024. 

Watermark Consulting. 2021 Customer Experience ROI Study. (https://watermarkconsult.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Watermark-Consulting-2021-Customer-Experience-ROI-Study.pdf). Accessed 8/8/2024. 

Deloitte. The true value of customer experiences. (https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-cons-the-true-value-of-customer-experiences.pdf). Accessed 8/8/2024.

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