E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries of this decade. Thanks to COVID, digital roadmaps across industries have quickly accelerated. If you weren’t yet online, it didn’t take long for brands to adapt when brick and mortar businesses across Asia Pacific were forced to shut down in 2020 and 2021.
It’s not been easy for e-commerce brands. After a whirlwind of COVID-spurred digital transformation, rapid brand expansion, and supply chain woes, consumer expectations and their relationships with e-commerce brands have changed before our eyes. So what can these brands do to get ahead of customer expectations? The key is to dive into your customer data. And we’re here to help.
Tip #1: Rethink the Digital Customer Journey
Because of the rapid growth that businesses have undergone, e-commerce brands have not had an opportunity to slow down and evaluate the experience they are delivering. The acceleration of digital roadmaps during the pandemic has meant that many elements might have been half-baked. Now that the “new normal” is underway, e-commerce brands should rethink the digital customer journey.
Tip #2: Invest in Customer Care
A lot of businesses had to scale back their customer care teams during the pandemic because they couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of call volumes enquiring about updated delivery processes and updated policies. We saw in these times of crisis that much of customer care is related to the digital journey. When customers have an inquiry, you need to find ways for customers to self-serve or use technology to reduce the number of enquiries that need to involve your care team.
Tip #3: Upgrade Your Technology
Advanced technology is now available to intercept customers browsing on site, and ask them questions to understand their current experience. InMoment’s Digital Intercept solution has the ability to capture rich data from logged in users when they’re taking a survey.
You can also integrate InMoment’s Rapid Resolution Engine, which is designed to analyse customer verbatim in real time. The technology uses tags that are customised to your businesses to provide helpful links, ultimately resolving concern and complaints, or “solve in survey,” before customers have to call into the contact centre.
Tip #4: Collect All Pieces of Data Possible: Explicit + Implicit + Operational
Most brands are proficient at collecting explicit data like NPS scores and customer verbatim. But have you considered layering implicit data over the top of it? Implicit data points like customer sentiment, emotion, cursor movement, and more can help you paint a more accurate picture of the customer experience. As a final step, adding in operational data like customer value and segmentation will allow you to be really targeted to the best place to trigger a digital intercept along the customer journey.
For more on upgrading customer experiences in e-commerce, check out this eBook “4 Digital Quick Wins”
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For many years now, conventional wisdom has held that the best way to listen to as many customers as possible is to turn every customer listening post within your customer experience (CX) program on and simply capture all insights that come your way. This strategy makes a simple kind of sense on paper; if you’re listening to as many people as possible, you’re bound to hear something pertinent to your CX and organizational goals, right?
The answer to that question is more complicated than conventional wisdom would have you believe. While it’s true that this approach will gain you a lot of data, a large portion of it may be wholly irrelevant to the CX goals you’re trying to achieve. At the same time, you may miss out on highly relevant data when you focus only on customer listening posts while leaving other signals, such as behavioral and operational data, aside.
So, is there a better, more efficient way to find data pertinent to what you need your program to achieve? As it happens, the answer is yes, and we’re going to get into it right now!
Where the Drive for Data Came From
If there’s a more targeted approach to gathering the data and insights you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI), why is the standard approach to simply gather as much data as possible? To answer this question, we need to remember that over the last 20 years, the word “data” has been seen by many organizations as a prescription for any business, technology, or marketplace problem. At the same time, the cost to capture and analyze data has also gone down significantly.
But don’t be under any illusions; just turning listening posts on and gathering as much data as possible does not translate directly to actionable business and experience solutions. Frankly, in most cases where CX programs are not focused and use all kinds of listening posts but rarely all relevant behavioral, operational, and contextual data, the resulting insights frequently leave brands with an endlessly tall mountain of white noise. That’s the state of affairs for far too many experience programs, and it’s why a lot of them fail.
A Better Approach
Rather than begin by flipping every light switch on and inhaling as much data as possible, brands should take a further step back when activating or refurbishing their experience program. They must, quite simply, design their program with their end goal in mind before any listening posts are even activated and before deciding which other data to ingest.
Taking time to design with the end in mind also allows you to consider which audiences are most relevant to which goals, as well as the approaches you need to take in order to connect to each one. This is a more targeted methodology than simply lying in wait for a large lake of data, and while it requires more initial legwork, the end result is a wealth of actionable intelligence that by and large curates itself.
Starting with clarity on intended outcomes and getting company-wide agreement on key performance indicators (KPI’s) gives your team concrete, quantifiable goals to connect your initiative to. It lays the basis for the management support and corporate buy-in you need to be successful.
Applying What You’ve Learned
Whether you’re intending to strengthen loyalty and grow your business with existing customers or to make efforts to win new ones, the approach I’ve laid out here makes all the difference when it comes not ‘just’ to ensuring the success of your CX program, but also creating Experience Improvement for your customers and employees that drives business outcomes. Patience and forethought will save you time that you’d otherwise spend attempting to connect data to business outcomes.
And, don’t forget to design your customer listening posts (and, consequently, your products and services) in an inclusive way. This is imperative not only from an ethical perspective, but also key to making your Experience Improvement initiatives truly effective from CX and EX standpoints.
Click here to read my full-length PoV on how customer listening with diversity and inclusion in mind can make the methodology I’ve detailed here even more beneficial for your customers, your employees, and your bottom line.
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What is the future for employee and customer experience trends in banks, wealth advisory firms, and credit unions? InMoment recently dove into the financial services industry’s 2022 outlook—and there’s a lot to unpack.
Through our dedicated Strategic Insights Team, we collected data from bank, wealth advisor, and credit union consumers and employees across North America. This year’s trends report has unearthed a few key discoveries that these businesses must pay attention to if they want to differentiate themselves in this competitive market.
When you have both customer and employee perspectives, it’s easier to rethink the workplace and how one experience affects the other. Let’s think through this together to improve finserv experiences for the long haul:
Employee and Customer Experience Trend #1: Digital Experiences and Personal Engagement is Vital to Improving Experiences
One of the first questions we asked customers and employees was, “what experiences are you looking forward to in the following industries [in 2022]?”
For Customers: Most banking customers responded with “tap-&-go or digital wallet” (Apple or Samsung). This hammers in a point this industry is all too aware of: digital transformation is a crucial element that all banks need to pay attention to as customer expectations evolve. And that extends to other types of financial services businesses as well, be it investment management or credit unions.
For Employees: On the other hand, employees have a unique perspective to add to this conversation. One stated that they would like:
“More time [spent] with customers around personal investments.”
— Financial Services Wealth Advisor
Of course, different firms operate with different goals in mind, but what’s important to take away here is how the customer experience is impacting the employee experience and vice versa. With this insight in mind, businesses across the financial services industry should include the employee perspective in their customer experience efforts. What do your bank tellers know about friction points in the in-branch experience? What improvements do your advisors think can be made in client sessions? The answers could lead to major improvements in the customer experience and to bottom line influencing factors like customer retention.
Employee and Customer Experience Trend #2: Focus on Both Digital and In-Person Interactions to Serve All Customers
We’ve all seen the articles claiming that the “in-branch experience is dead,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to our data, there are those customers that prefer 100% self-service capabilities, but there are also those customers that rely on in-person interactions—and there are employees that find fulfillment in serving those customers.
When asked what their primary expectations for their experiences were, the majority of consumers voiced their desire for self-serve options, specifically with investments profiles, banking services, or credit union interactions. At the same time, employees also expressed at the same time that they want training to support customers better, whether that is in a contact center, over live chat, or in-branch.
To satisfy both employee and customer expectations for experiences, finserv businesses need to make sure they are focused on both digital and in-person interactions, and make sure they are consistent while they’re at it.
Employee and Customer Experience Trend #3: How to Optimize Talent Acquisition for Gen Z
Employee values tend to shift from generation to generation and it’s the responsibility for businesses to acknowledge those changes if they want to last. That’s why employers everywhere have been thinking more about Gen Z and how they’ll carve out a future for the workplace, and finserv businesses are no exception.
To help banks, investment advisors, and other finserv employers understand Gen Z, we leveraged our latest trends report to dive into Market Pulse data as well as indirect and inferred transactional data and put together a pros and cons profile for the most critical factors in recruiting a Gen Z employee specifically in the finserv industry. Check it out below!
Based on these findings, Gen Z seems likely to be attracted to a work setting that prioritizes instilling a sense of purpose in employees and supporting a collaborative work community, on top of, understandably, ensuring financial security.
There are many ways to foster these attributes in your company’s work culture, but one thing is for sure: as Gen Z grows more prominent in the workforce, it is vital that businesses shape work cultures according to Gen Z ideals if they wish to attract top talent.
Not only did InMoment feature the financial services businesses like banks, wealth advisory firms, and credit unions in its newest Customer and Employee Experience Trends Report, but the research covers ten other industries as well! If you’d like to learn more about what’s happening in 2022’s experience realm, take a look at the full online version.
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Employee insights can come from a multitude of sources like unstructured data; and, with churn at record levels (overall turnover rate is estimated at 57.3 % per year, and with Gen Z changing jobs at a rate 134% higher than in pre-pandemic 2019)—and the cultural, operational, and customer value discontinuity this can create—it’s essential for every company to have, and apply, every piece of relevant data.
Information from employees gives businesses power and can be leveraged to enhance customer experience, resulting in higher retention, more positive customer behavior, and stronger business outcomes.
Workforce Analytics and Voice of Employee
Employee data streams come from two principal frameworks: People Analytics and Voice of Employee (VoE). People Analytics aka Workforce Analytics, are the data sets HR uses to make recruitment more effective, increase retention and longevity, and improve fit, alignment, and productivity. The pandemic has had a profound effect on people analytics, with challenges coming from differing industries, job/role types, and locations. Today’s most successful companies can and do, utilize internal and external data to enhance workforce strategy through better planning.
Voice of Employee is a bit more complex, and given today’s talent landscape and heightened set of employee responsibilities, perhaps even more crucial. VoE programs collect, analyze, and distill employee feedback to identify areas of performance, challenge, and opportunity. These programs were largely manual until recently, which is both costly and time-inefficient. Also, when traditional people analytics tools were applied to unstructured data, the resulting text analytics were superficial, yielding little real actionability. The best and most contemporary approach for employee-generated text analytics is natural language processing, or NLP.
…Organizations that use workforce analytics have the most engaged workforces, and they thrive in tough conditions.
Leveraging Natural Language Processing for VoE Analytics
With Natural Language Processing for VoE, organizations can gather an in-depth understanding of factors driving emotionally-based behavior and performance, resulting in clear and impactful programmatic recommendations that drive engagement, loyalty, and commitment.
Gather: All data sources (surveys, reviews, messages, emails, chat threads, and other communication) can form a single stream
Process: NLP analyses can be run utilizing HR language, with customized dashboards, or they can be exported to the organization’s business intelligence tool
Analyze: Identify areas of focus and experience and emotionally-based sentiment with the power of NLP
Act: NLP enables narratives on topics, trends, and patterns to be developed, along with root cause issues and supporting data
Figures 1&2 / Polarity data visualization from insurance company reviews
Using NLP helps businesses identify key topics, categories, themes, intentions from every document in the data stream, and detailed sentiment analysis. And, when compared to open source and traditional people analytics techniques, NLP is more efficient and requires less technical support. NLP is, as well, both highly configurable and completely secure with any infrastructure.
All employees have stories about their experiences and those of customers. NLP helps organizations hear, understand, share, and leverage those stories to make business decisions that make work life and their customers’ lives better.
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10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program
This game-changing guide offers an in-depth exploration of how to build and implement a fully-stacked integrated CX program that stands at the forefront of today’s business evolution.
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For what feels like much longer than a few weeks, the InMoment team has watched along with everyone else the horrific events unfolding in Ukraine. The sudden, unprovoked invasion has exacted an unimaginable toll of pain and suffering, and our hearts go out to the Ukrainian people as they contend with the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II.
Some of our team members have family and loved ones who either hail from, are fleeing, or staying in Ukraine, and we imagine a fair few of you readers do as well.
Though these are uncertain times, especially for the people of Ukraine, we take heart and inspiration from the Ukrainian people’s courage. The news has been heavy with headlines about casualties, but amid all of it, there have been countless stories of hope and heroism.
Whether it’s ferrying injured pets to the Polish border, young couples taking up arms right after tying the knot, or border countries housing refugees, the Ukrainian people and their allies have displayed courage, honor, and resolve that we believe sets a powerful example for the rest of us.
It may feel like there’s nothing that those of us outside of Ukraine can do to make a difference, but that’s not the case. In fact, there are a variety of resources and charities you can contribute to to help:
UNCHR
Voices of Children
Sunflower of Peace
1. UNCHR
As of writing, at least three million civilians have fled Ukraine ahead of the Russian invasion. UNCHR is dedicated to helping those civilians find their way to safety, and to ensuring their wellbeing along the way. Donations are always appreciated and can be made here.
2. Voices of Children
As its name implies, Voices of Children is a charity that aims to help kids affected by war. The charity provides psychosocial and psychological assistance to children whose lives have been disrupted by conflicts all over the globe, and stands ready to channel any donations toward that goal.
3. Sunflower of Peace
Whereas the other charities mentioned here focus primarily on families and children, Sunflower of Peace aims to provide doctors and healthcare professionals with the resources they need to make a difference in Ukraine. Any contributions are greatly appreciated and can be made here.
What Lies Ahead
It’s difficult to know what the future holds for the people of Ukraine, but InMoment stands with the Ukrainian people and extends its wishes for safety to everyone in that sovereign nation in the weeks, months, and years ahead. In the meantime, please give what you can spare to these or other charities, and together we can make a difference for a people in need.
Customer experience (CX) leaders from utilities brands are facing unprecedented challenges in 2022. Increased government regulation and new market entrants with unique service-based offerings are creating a disruptive wave of change that traditional utilities need to respond to. But here at InMoment, we don’t like to merely dwell on obstacles and complexities. We like to provide you with strategies and solutions.
With that being said, Graham Tutton, InMoment’s Global Head of Consumer Products, has put some thoughts together around some of the biggest challenges facing the utilities sector, and what customer experience leaders can do about these for our latest webinar. And to save you some time, we’ve taken those and compiled them into this quick article.
Let’s dive in!
Challenge #1: Disparate Data
Utilities companies typically have a lot of data spread across multiple silos across the business. The challenge is combining the operational, technical, financial, and even the metadata (like weather data) that is currently sitting in legacy systems or different departments, and is also aggregated with feedback data. Additionally, brands have not figured out how to tap into 85% of data—the unstructured kind—so they miss out on the bigger picture.
Solve the Challenge: Combine Data Sources
Many CX leaders in this space find it challenging to stitch together holistic customer feedback in one place, and know how to take action from it. At the end of the day, you need a single platform that can combine direct survey data from customers, but also indirect data (like social media reviews), and inferred data (like contact centre chat logs).
Challenge 2: Figuring Out Customer Trends
Because data is spread across the organisation, making sense of emerging customer trends is even harder. Businesses want to make the best decisions based on the available information. However, these decisions are often flawed because businesses do not have the ability to understand the data they’re looking at. Businesses cling to the easy insights floating at the top of their datasets, but often miss the deeper insights hidden behind unstructured data.
According to IDC, 85% of enterprise data is unstructured and is growing at a rate of 55% every year. With this rate of growth, businesses that fail to adapt miss out on the bigger picture and are making flawed decisions based on only a small percentage of the data available.
Solve the Challenge: Text Analytics to the Rescue
Luckily, text analytics capabilities are getting better and better each year! Businesses should leverage human-led, knowledge-based taxonomies by finding a partner that offers high accuracy and actionability, offering economies of scale from a wealth of knowledge gained in your industry, language and use case.
Challenge #3: Taking Action on Feedback
Some utilities brands find it tricky to know which actions to take after analysing their customer experience data. There are many reasons for this—most customer experience solutions require multi-language translation, human interpretation and maintenance, and continuous tuning of surveys. To make matters worse, because the process is so slow, the accuracy of the insights are impacted too. CX leaders are often stuck in the cycle of wading through data and less enabled to actually take action on it.
Solve the Challenge: Have a Roadmap From the Beginning
If you build your CX program around a roadmap (with clear checkpoints, of course), it will help you stay focused on your ultimate goals. You should be checking in with your roadmap monthly, and evaluating actions against the checkpoints every quarter. By constantly referring back to the original plan, it will help build your organisational culture around the customer, and this will definitely help with momentum of your program, taking you further than you could possibly go if you were shouldering the weight of the CX program alone.
To learn more, check out Graham’s full CX webinar designed just for utilities brands.
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Just discovered InMoment? Curious to know a little more about us and our differentiated Experience Improvement (XI)? Well allow us to introduce ourselves!
Own the Moments That Matter
At InMoment, we have this saying: “Own the Moments That Matter.” This is fundamental to our mission, because those moments—packed full of emotions, judgements, learnings, and more—shape the world we live in. And with every moment, there is an opportunity to make a positive impact; to leave a mark.
But when it comes to your business, there are simply some moments that matter more, to your customer, employees, and beyond.
Our goal is to empower you with the data, technology, and human expertise necessary to identify the moments that matter, understand what’s working (and what might need improvement), take informed action to solve business problems, and ultimately provide a truly differentiated experience for your business.
Our CEO Andrew Joiner said it best: “Whether it’s customer acquisition, growth, or retention that’s needed, InMoment brings a rigor, discipline, and science that makes our results trusted by the boards and executive teams of the world’s best brands.”
What Is Experience Improvement (XI)?
Despite increased investment, experience management programs have plateaued. Why?
Because experiences don’t need to be managed or measured, they need to be improved.
The truth is that monitoring services and D.I.Y. approaches aren’t enough for today’s businesses; they cause program stagnation and make meaningful return on investment (ROI) impossible. Instead, what’s required for success is a new approach: an Experience Improvement (XI) initiative that solves the biggest business challenges, like retention, growth, and cost savings.
The Moments That Matter
Improving experiences begins with sifting out the noise from experience data and identifying the moments that matter: where customer, employee, and business needs meet. This allows businesses to prioritize their focus on high-emotion, high-impact areas and connect with their most valued customers. Additionally, businesses can empower their employees to recognize and take action in these moments, ultimately culminating in organization-wide transformation from the boardroom to the break room.
Data, Technology, and Human Expertise
Experience Improvement is made possible through our industry-leading Experience Intelligence XI technology and our in-house Experience Improvement (XI) services teams. With our ability to collect and gather data from anywhere and in any form, industry-leading technology, and decades of experience in key industries, InMoment can help you craft an experience initiative that truly meets the unique needs of your business. We are dedicated to being more than just a vendor to our clients—instead we take the role of a dedicated partner committed to a businesses’ short- and long-term success.
The Intersection of Value
Our mission is to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together. Ultimately, our clients are able to move the needle and go beyond managing their experience to actually improving it. With the right intelligence, businesses can empower the right people to take transformative, informed action in the most effective ways and drive value across four key areas: acquisition, retention, cross-sell & upsell, and cost reduction. In other words, better results for the business and better experiences for their customers and employees.
The Continuous Improvement Framework
The key to taking an experience program beyond metrics is to move beyond monitoring customer feedback and stories and focus on the formation of actionable plans for changes informed by them. Customer narratives contain meaning that companies can use to diagnose both superficial and deep-seated problems, define remedies to those problems, positively impact the bottom line, and create more meaningful experiences. We help our clients achieve all of this by sticking to a simple, five-step framework that we call the Continuous Improvement Framework: define, listen, understand, transform, realize. (You can read all about it here!)
Does this Experience Improvement (XI) mission align with your vision? We’d love to hear from you—reach out to our team for a chat here!
It’s no joke to say that we live in uncertain times. We’re hopefully turning the page on a pandemic, but steep inflation and unrest both at home and abroad are making many customers nervous about what’s around the corner. Unfortunately, this attitude and the events precipitating it have a big impact on customer experience (CX), which means that CX professionals like you face the daunting task of keeping your CX program effective in the face of multiple challenges. As a perennially “glass half full” person. I prefer to see this “daunting task” as a great opportunity!
Where to start, though? Whether you’re running an existing program or looking to start a new initiative, what steps can you take to ensure that your effective CX program gets off on the right foot? Today’s discussion focuses on achieving that start and ensuring that your CX program will bring you business value that helps you stay ahead of the competition. More specifically, we’re going to cover the first two steps in our success improvement framework:
Step 1: Design
Step 2: Listen
Step 1: Design
Unfortunately, we see far too many clients start a CX program by just turning on some listening posts (social media, review sites, survey feedback, etc) and hoping for relevant insights to come to the surface. However, as the old adage goes, hope is not a plan. Listening is certainly an important part of the process, but if you want your CX program to truly succeed for you in uncertain times, it’s important to actually begin a step before hitting the lights and focus on a more foundational program element: design. I often tell my clients to design with the end in mind—it’s an approach aimed at helping you first understand what you need your CX program to accomplish in specific and quantifiable business terms, then keeping that guiding ethos front of mind as you execute the rest of your program.
So, what does the end goal look like for you? Do you need to pivot to new, post-pandemic messaging with a certain audience segment? Are you a finserv brand that needs to reassure clients rattled by inflation? Whatever the case, identifying your goals before you activate your CX program is critical to ensure your program is successful. It’s always better to begin with concrete, quantifiable objectives than to listen first and try to work backwards from there.
Step 2: Listen
Taking a step back to define your program’s goals makes the next step in the process, listening, a lot easier than trying to turn all your signal sources on first. When you design with the end in mind, you give yourself an opportunity not just to define your program’s goals, but also to identify the audience segments most relevant to those goals, as well as the channels that those individuals tend to prefer. The end result of all that legwork? Much better, much cleaner, and much more relevant data.
Now you’ve reached the point where you can actually turn your listening posts on, and with this target profile handy, you’ll begin to receive data that will contain much more effective and actionable insights. This is a foundational way to keep your CX program effective, and it’ll also help you get an idea of what messaging you need to issue and what actions you need to take to keep customers feeling happy and connected to in uncertain times. It’s critical to look beyond just the survey. I believe there are three data sources to “listen” to: direct data (from surveys), indirect data (from outside sources like social media) and inferred data (operational non-customer data that can be overlayed with the other sources).
The Next Level
To recap: it’s important to consider what you need your CX program to accomplish for your brand (especially in times like these), and to design your program with those end goals in mind before activating any listening posts. Using this strategy makes the listening stage of this process much easier, as you will have already set your program up to collect only the data most relevant to your organization’s goals and needs.
What comes after that, though? Once you’ve completed the design legwork and gathered this ultra-pertinent data, how best can you scour it for actionable insights and meaningfully transform your brand in a way customers will appreciate? To learn more, click here for my full-length point of view document on how to apply what you’ve listened for to effective transformation, especially as it pertains to the current inflation crisis.
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International Women’s Day 2022 is here! To mark the day, we asked some of our women in customer experience (CX) for the best career advice they’d like to share with our readers. Hopefully these ideas will help you take your career to the next level.
We asked our female CX leaders, “What advice do you have for female professionals starting their career in customer experience?”
“Restructuring has become a norm which you will encounter at some point in your career. Don’t feel you have to fit into or accept a role that is not what you wanted. Shape your role proactively by talking to your manager and review your career goals and skill set every year to see if you are still growing. If not, it might be time to find another role.”
Tip #2: Bring the Passion!
Trish Roberts, Voice of the Customer Programme Manager at New Zealand Post
“Bring your passion and care to the role. It’s been instrumental in driving engagement from stakeholders and continually connects me back to my reasons for building a career in this sector. Ultimately, my goal is to improve the customer and organisational experience. I also feel when you bring that fire and passion to everything you do in customer experience it makes it a truly exciting and fulfilling place to be!”
Tip #3: Take a Risk
Wing Poon, VOC & CX Strategy Lead at Medibank
“Don’t be afraid to apply for jobs even if your skill set doesn’t 100% fit the job description—because no one’s will perfectly fit!”
Tip #4: Know Your Worth
Wing Poon, VOC & CX Strategy Lead at Medibank
“Don’t be afraid to proactively ask for a promotion and a raise. Arm yourself with evidence of achievements and market salary information for negotiations.”
Tip #5: Take Opportunities When They Surface
Linda Broady, Customer Success Director at InMoment APAC
“I discovered my passion for customer experience early in my career, but getting a foothold in the field meant taking on a couple of specialist and operational CX roles before ultimately landing my dream role as Head of CX. My passion for customer experience has since led me in other directions, enabling me to further broaden my experience and in my current role, share that experience with my clients.”
“I believe the last two years, more than ever, have demanded we put the ‘human’ back into the corporate world. We have seen pets, family, and home space merge with our work space. So, my advice to anyone starting out in the CX space is to not shy away from bringing the human into your work. Customer experience (and work in general) is so much richer when we are all our authentic selves, always.”
Tip #7: Find Your Tribe
Trish Roberts, Voice of the Customer Programme Manager at New Zealand Post
“Surround yourself with interesting, creative and intelligent women, who lift each other up. I’m lucky to have worked with some incredibly collaborative and respected women over my career who I have learnt from and passed those skills on to others. When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.”
Tip #8: Bring Others Along the Journey
Morgan Jackson, Senior Customer Feedback Specialist, ACC
“Passion, resilience, relationships, and empathy are the four words that resonate with me as I reflect on my career in CX. Everyone I engaged with when establishing our VoC program advised us not to underestimate the culture change required to implement. If you are prepared to take the time to bring others on the journey with you, understand their challenges, explore solutions together this will result in better outcomes that enable your success long term.”
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One tool is practically synonymous with the customer experience (CX) industry: surveys. Since the inception of the industry, targeted customer experience surveys have been seen as a foundational listening and research tool that leverages strategic questions to collect data from a specific group of customers.
Sending out a targeted survey is the first step to improving customer experiences, employee experiences, and even the bottom line. Once a targeted survey has collected the desired data, a top-notch Experience Improvement platform mines that data using advanced analytics to uncover actionable insights. And once an action plan is made and carried out, businesses can improve their practices and processes in a way that helps them to acquire new customers and employees, retain existing ones, identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and eliminate extra costs.
All that starts with a targeted survey. But what are the best practices for creating a targeted survey? How do you get started? Well, that’s what we will break down today!
Picking Your Audience
The first step to a successful targeted survey? Selecting a target audience! Ask your team, “Who are we trying to appeal to? How do we want to improve their experience?” The audience in question should be one that is crucial to your strategy, so be sure to examine sales data, demographics, and other analytics to inform your decision.
For instance, let’s say that you are a fast casual restaurant looking to launch a new menu item in a specific region. Your target audience would then be customers from that region who are regulars at your restaurant. That would be helpful to gauging interest in your new sandwich combo!
You can also leverage other, more general surveys that ask broader questions in order to identify more specific populations to survey. Additionally, it’s possible that your company already has the data you need! Check other relevant data or research that may have already been done on your desired subject. If the insights you need are already in your possession, this can help you avoid the dreaded survey fatigue in your customers (and employees).
Four Principles for Building a Good Survey
At InMoment, we often get questions like, “What is the best way to design a survey?”, “What questions should I include?”, and “What rating scales should I use?”. The quick answer to those questions is that it depends on both the type and the topic of the survey.
Principle #1: Design with the End in Mind
This principle is also referred to as the “Backward Research Process.” When you design with the end in mind, you must first think about the decisions you want to make and actions you want to take based on the information you collect.
Are you focused on increasing customer retention by identifying customers who had a poor experience? Do you want to “grade” your outlets or employees on their ability to serve customers? Do you want to assess which specific customer-handling processes are and are not working? The content of your survey should be guided by your answers to these questions. And since you’ve already identified your target audience, you’re ahead of the game!
Principle #2: Generate Hypotheses When Designing Your Survey
While designing the survey, it is often helpful to generate some hypotheses about how you think the results might turn out. This exercise can help you define what information you need to either collect or append to your survey data.
Principle #3: Ask the Right Questions
Don’t ask all the questions. Ask the right questions. Depending on your desired outcome, you might use a variation of these question types:
Multiple Choice Questions
Text Entry Questions
Quotas and Qualifications
Principle #4: Don’t Forget About The Survey Invitation
One of the most neglected parts of the survey design process is the survey invitation. Often, it is designed as an after-thought. You need to design your email invitation to maximize the likelihood that customers will receive it, notice it, open it, and click the survey link.
A well-designed, branded targeted survey experience is key!
Learn from the Data
You’ve zeroed in on your audience, chosen strategic questions, and sent out an optimized invitation—now the data is rolling in! This is the most exciting part of the process, because that feedback you’re receiving will be the basis of your next major improvements to the customer experience!
Your Experience Improvement (XI) tools (such as our Active Listening Studio) will be able to ingest that data, and not only reveal insights, but will pinpoint the moments that matter (or the interactions, channels, and touchpoints that most impact your business). Prioritizing those moments helps you to take swift action to improve not only experiences, but also your bottom line.
After you’ve taken these actions toward Experience Improvement, you can also send follow up surveys to identify the effectiveness of your improvements and fuel continuous efforts toward experience excellence.
How InMoment’s Active Listening Studio Can Help
InMoment’s Active Listening Studio is a one of a kind listening suite that gives you the control to gather feedback at every touchpoint, allowing customers to tell you what matters most to them without bombarding them with survey after survey. Active Listening Studio includes:
DIY Survey Creation
Our AI-powered Engagement Engine™
The Rapid Resolution Engine™
Our Eligibility Engine™
Social Monitoring
Multimedia Feedback
Leveraging these tools allows you to create a more effective targeted survey, optimize your listening strategy, and ultimately prove that you’ve improved experiences and your business. One of our global retail clients was even able to increase survey response rates by 37% and response length by 38%!
Want to learn more about how InMoment can help you conduct a better targeted survey—and improve your customer experiences, employee experiences, and beyond? Contact our team today and we’d be happy to explore the right options for your business!
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Why Is There An Urgent Need For Companies To Do This Now?
Covid-influenced working conditions have contributed to employee disconnection from company culture, disaffection, and even emotional burnout, resulting in high prospective churn rates in many business sectors, i.e. “The Great Resignation”. Employee disconnection and discontinuity also have both an indirect and a direct impact on customer behavior. As viewed by many consulting organizations in their evaluations of this unfolding era of chronic talent shortages coupled with low unemployment rates, the conjoined, common themes of enterprise humanity and reframed purpose seem to be among the most attainable stakeholder prescriptives for dealing with the current employee landscape.
So, the state of organizational culture has tremendous and undeniable influence on employee behavior. In the famous words of Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Unfortunately, and rather irrespective of the beliefs of some corporate leaders and consultants, no amount of strategic corporate sophistication and modeling can work a company out of a toxic, unfocused purpose, and non-humanistic culture. It must come through disciplined leadership, investment, assessment, and change.
The challenges for many organizations, though, is that they have either minimally addressed or completely missed the impact of enterprise culture on the level of employee connectedness, contribution, and commitment.
Why Can’t Traditional Employee Engagement Research Target Company Culture For Improvement?
Classic engagement research, as practiced since the mid-1980’s, is very effective at identifying employee perceptions into the nature of their jobs, the relationship between employee and manager, employee and co-workers, and the line of sight between the employee performance and company performance. It also functions on the frequently disproved tactical assumption that ‘happy employees = happy customers”, and so is designed to only superficially address the relationship between deeper feelings and beliefs about enterprise culture and resultant employee behavior.
For organizations to recognize employee needs and wants within today’s rapidly changing landscape, there must first be a recognition that employees, as stakeholders and assets to the company, have many of the same behavioral and life stage issues as customers. And, just as customer behavior can range from high negativity/sabotage to high positivity/advocacy, so too can employee behavior. The goals for employees, then, are commitment and connected behavior, with advocacy as the highest state.
The foundation for attaining this goal is an understanding of cultural impact. More specifically, today organizations need to identify, and leverage, employee perceptions of culture relative to:
Cohesion of functions and units/groups within the company
Enterprise/functional/group customer and value focus
Management/leadership effectiveness, integrity, and trust
Influences on morale – diversity, inclusiveness, communication, latitude
Support for personal career, growth, training, and work/life balance
Is There A Clear And Actionable Path To Company Culture Improvement?
The quick, and encouraging, answer is ‘Yes. There is’. This path, however, requires several things. First, senior leadership must have, or develop, an understanding of where the cultural challenges exist for employees. Next, the organization must be both disciplined in discovery and change and willing to make at least some investment. The financial and time investment comes through macro culture maturity assessment, targeted qualitative and quantitative employee research focused only on their connection, and commitment to, company culture, and development of communication, process, and other techniques for building and sustaining greater connection with and by employees.
This path is not necessarily simple, and sometimes not easy, because cultural DNA is often strongly embedded, and change-resistant, within the enterprise. But, in the wise words of Yoda when confronted by Luke Skywalker’s reluctance to embrace new thinking: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”
Want to learn more about the power of employee experience (EX) and the benefits it brings to your bottomline? Read our eBook on understanding the power of employee engagement.
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10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program
This game-changing guide offers an in-depth exploration of how to build and implement a fully-stacked integrated CX program that stands at the forefront of today’s business evolution.
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Whether you’re just getting started on your customer experience (CX) initiative or hitting pause to see how things are going, the term “customer experience governance” is probably something you hear your team bring up all the time. You probably also already know that customer experience governance refers to the system that sends insights to where they need to go and that holds certain team members accountable for different aspects of your initiative.
But which governance style works best for you? No two organizations are the same, which means that a governance style that works for another brand’s CX program may not be your organization’s cup of tea! We’ve got you covered, though—here’s three different customer experience governance approaches you can take a look at as you evaluate your program.
This one’s pretty self-explanatory, and ideal for companies that are highly centralized. Simply put, a directive governance approach is a top-down model that gives the same parameters and goals to every piece of your CX program in every region your company has a foot in. This model makes room for some localization, but espouses a direct-line approach from one team and clear sponsorship from at least one member of the executive team.
The advantage to a setup like this, especially if your initiative sounds like what we’ve laid out, is that all program abilities are managed as one function and the team at the heart of it all is highly collaborative. This can make it easier for your team to roll out improvements and quickly hand initiative changes down across multiple facets of your program. On the flip side, though, the folks implementing those changes on the ground may disengage if they feel too far removed from this centralized decision-making process.
This governance style is a bit more loosey-goosey compared to the directive approach. Rather than rely strictly on a single, centralized team, the consensus-based approach gives regional teams greater autonomy. Whereas the directive approach we talked about earlier is great for brands whose regional operations are more or less the same, the consensus-based style is ideal for organizations whose regional teams work in much more varied conditions.
You probably already see where this is going when it comes to advantages and disadvantages—on one hand, this style is great for making regional teams feel included and for gaining on-the-ground insights that make your program better! But, by the same token, decentralizing decision-making power can result in lengthier deliberations, knowledge gaps, and the chance that some regional teams stray a bit too far from the path. Still, it’s a style well-worth considering if that different regional ops environment sounds like your organization.
Customer Experience Governance Approach #3: Local
This one’s on the opposite end of our spectrum from the directive approach, and encourages local/regional teams to take up the lion’s share of CX responsibilities. A central team may still exist somewhere in the initiative hierarchy, but with this style, its main task is mostly to share data, tools, and coaching. The heavy lifting, the action-taking, is left to groups and individuals outside of that team.
If your brand consists of, say, locally owned and operated franchises, or simply has a history of reduced central control, you might find this style most to your liking. It can enable franchisees and regional managers to turn their locations into CX powerhouses that are each very tailored to the areas they serve. However, this also creates the danger of program and experience inconsistency, both of which risk leaving customers confused and disengaged if they frequent multiple locales. Making group decisions is also, of course, more difficult with an approach this decentralized.
Decisions, Decisions
So, which of these sounds most like your organization, or most like the setup that would be great for a new or refurbished CX program? If you’re still on the fence and want to learn more, click here to see our new infographic on the subject, with more details and considerations for each customer experience governance approach. Customer experience governance is a challenge at the best of times, but if you can find the approach that works best for you, you’ll be well on your way to achieving continuous Experience Improvement (XI).
Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities
Whether you’re struggling with limited resources, data fragmentation, or evolving customer expectations, this guide offers the expert advice you need to elevate your CX strategy. Download now to discover how to transform these challenges into growth opportunities.
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