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How to Use Survey Templates to Drive Your Customer Feedback Efforts

Have you ever needed to get information from your customers, but weren’t sure what the best way to get it was? Or you weren’t sure which questions were the right ones to ask? Or you simply don’t have the time to build an entirely new survey from scratch? That’s where survey templates come in.

Whether you are a small business owner looking to run your first survey, or you’re building a new transactional survey for all your locations nationwide, survey templates are there to guide you through the whole process.

New to survey templates? Don’t worry, in this article we will cover:

What is a Survey Template?
What are the different types of Survey Templates?
How Can I Create a Survey Based on a Survey Template?

What Are Survey Templates?

As you know, surveys are a great way to gather data from customers, do market research, and understand how the public views your brand. But, not every survey is built from scratch.

Survey templates are guides for a survey that you would send out to your target demographic. You can select a template based on what you are looking for, and then fill out the building blocks with questions that you want answered!

What Are the Different Types of Survey Templates?

Do you want to know how your customers felt the last time they purchased something from you? Or maybe you’re curious to understand how customers feel about your latest product? For every question, there is a survey template to help you answer it.

Different templates help you answer different questions. Here are some of the major survey template categories:

Employee Experience Survey Templates: Helps you measure employee satisfaction and motivation. Allows you to turn feedback into actionable insights.
Academic Evaluation Survey Templates: If you’re curious what students think about professors, curriculum, or facilities, this is the survey template for you.
Satisfaction Survey Templates: If you’re looking to measure how a client feels about your services, or how your employees felt about an event, look no further! This is the survey template for you.
Marketing and Market Research Survey Templates: Want to understand which demographic is gravitating towards your business? A Market Research Survey is right for you.
Product and Industry Survey Templates: After releasing a new product, a Product Survey Template is a great way to understand how your customers feel about it!
Customer Evaluation Survey Templates: Looking to get customer feedback or why a customer no longer wants your services? A Customer Evaluation Survey will help you to recover that at-risk revenue.

How Can I Create a Survey Based on a Survey Template?

Once you have identified what kind of survey template is best for you, it’s time to build your survey. Don’t worry, it’s a breeze.

When you are creating surveys with InMoment’s XI Platform, you have everything you need to have successful surveys. You’ll be able to easily collect feedback, customize questions, edit existing surveys, and invite customers and employees to provide feedback.

Whether you choose the freedom to create your own surveys or solicit InMoment’s expert services to develop surveys as a service, you’ll receive seamless survey creation.

When you are creating surveys, you can choose a pre-built survey template that already comes loaded with questions and is ready for launch! Then, just sit back, monitor response rates and watch the data come in.

If you would rather see a survey with your own questions, you can take one of our customizable survey templates and customize them how you see fit!

Interested in using InMoment’s survey templates to take your business to the next level? Check them out here!

In this Post

What Are Survey Templates?What Are the Different Types of Survey Templates?How Can I Create a Survey Based on a Survey Template?

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

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Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

CX 101: What Is Primary Research?

If you want to get to know someone, the best way to get an accurate assessment is to ask them questions yourself. You may want to know what they like and don’t like, what makes them happy, sad, or angry, how they feel about specific topics, or anything else that gives you greater insight into their personality.

The same is true when you’re trying to understand market research; having an accurate assessment of your audience and their buying patterns will make all the difference when it comes to customer satisfaction and business sales. You need to know what makes them excited or frustrated, how they respond to specific issues or perspectives, and topics that are relevant to them, all so that you can better understand and help them. This also provides a better grasp of industry trends and challenges so that organizations can offer memorable and fulfilling content, experiences, and products.

The best way to get accurate data, though, is to gather it yourself whenever possible. That’s where primary research comes in. This guide will cover everything you need to know about primary research and how you can capitalize on the many opportunities it provides.

What Is Primary Research?

Primary research is a methodology of research that requires you to collect data yourself (or commission someone else to conduct the research), meaning you are not using someone else’s research or data. From detailed surveys to intensive focus groups, primary research allows you to directly examine, explore, and record how your audience responds to or feels about certain subjects.

Businesses use primary research for a variety of reasons, such as discovering what their clients or customers need from their product or the kind of language that speaks to their target audience. Organizations also use this kind of primary research to improve the experience of both customers and employees and optimize their service.

Primary Research Methods and Examples

The more accurate data you can gather, the better prepared you will be for the data-driven world that businesses run on. Here are some methods of primary research to help you discover the kind of data you want to gather and how you should go about your research.

Surveys

Surveys are versatile and, when well-made, incredibly useful ways to gather quantitative information. They are a quick way to get honest opinions or preferences from both customers and employees without demanding too much work from them. Plus, online and automated surveys make it extra easy for both the participants and the researchers—they can be conveniently sent via email and accessed on all sorts of devices.

Surveys should have a variety of open-ended and closed questions so that participants have the opportunity to give greater details for their answers while also providing more numerical data. You want to keep your survey short and focused. That said, you can use a rating scale, multiple choice, ranking, and drop-down questions, among many other types of questions.

Make sure you have a predetermined theme that you can tie each question back to, as well as a target audience that will give you the most relevant responses. For example, let’s say you just launched a new navigation layout on your online store website and want to know how it’s being received. You would need to create questions all related to the usability, convenience, and flow of the navigation. You could do this by sending the survey to someone who just made a purchase and asking them to rate their experience or specific elements of your online store.

Interviews

Interviews are a much broader way to collect information, and unlike the quantitative nature of most surveys, interviews are more qualitative since they are usually created with open-ended questions. You can do interviews in person and face-to-face, or you can do them over the phone. You can usually get more in-depth answers with interviews depending on the interviewer and their experience with interviewing. Great interviewers can especially get great results for in-person interviews.

If you need large amounts of information for a relatively short list of participants, interviewers are an excellent option. They can last 10-30 minutes or sometimes longer depending on the nature of the work you’re doing. Just know that in-person interviews can influence the comfort level and the responses of interviewees, so an expert interviewer will be able to create the right environment and read the room to accurately record the responses.

An example of a good interview opportunity would be if you need to gather information about a certain subject from experts. Imagine a company that develops equipment for a specific medical condition and needs to improve its current model. This company could interview both the specialists and doctors who assist patients as well as the patients themselves to get concrete answers directly from the source.

Observations

If you need to collect data but don’t want to directly interact with “respondents” in order to protect the accuracy of the data, then observations may be the best route for you. While it can be difficult to create these scenarios, observation primary research is a method where there is no direct interaction between the researcher and the person being observed. All the researcher does is observe and record how the target group or person reacts or responds.

There are usually either trained specialists who know what to look for while observing or people who use cameras to document the experience. This is especially good for removing as much bias as possible.

Let’s say a restaurant offers customers a complimentary appetizer if they have to wait longer than an hour. That restaurant could install cameras and study how many people wait, how long they last if they decide to leave, the size of groups that are willing to wait, etc.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are small groups of people, usually no larger than 6-10 individuals, who come together and discuss questions that are provided by a moderator. This is ideal for a group of experts who can discuss a topic at length or even a group of customers who can offer greater insight into your product. This is a good opportunity to identify pain points, niche parts of an industry, or how well people respond to a new idea or product.

Maybe you want to improve your employee incentive program—you could put together a small focus group within the company to start a discussion about potential benefits and see what people react well to. Or, let’s say you’re launching a new product but aren’t sure how your target audience will receive it. A small focus group could interact with or use your product and then offer feedback in a focus group.

Research Services & Data Analysis

It’s one thing to conduct a survey or an interview, but it’s another thing to process, analyze, and act upon that data you gather. Even putting an effective research project together can be overwhelming for businesses, which is why research services are another method of primary research. You can hire a team of experts or find a program that quickly compiles your data into usable statistics.

This is also best if you need help with data analysis, which is the process of inspecting and screening your reports for objective, accurate, and insightful data. This can be a huge project, which is why experts who know how to categorize and analyze data are particularly helpful for businesses and organizations.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Primary Research

Here are some major benefits of primary research as well as certain challenges to be aware of.

Advantages

Accuracy and Relevance: When you conduct the research yourself, you don’t have to worry about the work or bias of other researchers—you account for everything, which means you gather exactly what you need.
Control: Every step of your primary research is intentional, meaning you have more control over the kind of results you get. Decisions are made at your own discretion, and you don’t have to worry about citations or relying on other sources.
Up to date: You don’t have to rely on outdated sources or statistics. Instead, you get just what you need for your specific goals at the time you need it.
Improved customer experiences: Primary research is also particularly beneficial for your customers and clients since you are directly improving the customer experience with your business offering. You can conduct market surveys in-house by using the InMoment platform to make the most of your survey analysis.

Disadvantages

Resources: Not everyone has the time or the money to conduct their own research. Planning, executing, reporting, and analyzing the data you gather is expensive and demanding. This can prevent both the quality and the accuracy of work if you use poor resources, cut corners, or rush the process.
Feasibility: Especially when poorly designed, not all primary research projects are realistic. Interviewing every member of your staff of 500, for example, isn’t a reasonable goal.
Research Bias: Even though you get to customize your research, you also have to be especially careful when it comes to objectivity. Your opinions, assumptions, and preferences must not get in the way of accurate research, which isn’t always easy. Sometimes, an unbiased third party can help businesses accurately gather and analyze their data.

Primary Research Vs. Secondary Research

There are two core types of research: primary and secondary. Primary research is a powerful tool for businesses; however, secondary research, which is research that you don’t conduct yourself but gather from other sources, shouldn’t be dismissed. In fact, the best scholars and businesses use a combination of primary and secondary research to round out their perspectives.

Using both primary and secondary research is what gives you a comprehensive report of your findings—the more reliable sources that support your findings, the more credible and usable your data is. Sometimes, primary research is mainly done to supplement or confirm findings done in secondary research.

For example, a tech company may want to update its work-from-home policy. They may find secondary research that offers some insight into what employees prefer, but they could also do their own primary research to get specific information from their own employees that is accurate and up to date.

The bottom line is that primary research and secondary research are both more rewarding and useful when used in conjunction with each other, not in competition. Primary research will give you data or information specific to your concerns, company, customers, industry, etc. Secondary research may offer applicable insights into your questions and concerns as well, though there are limits to how directly the information relates to your niche goals.

Primary Research with InMoment

If you want to be competitive in your field, encourage honesty and authenticity among your employees, and produce effective market research, it’s time to use InMoment. You don’t have to be an analyst, a scholar, or a mathematician to do your own primary research—you can trust the expertise and advanced technology of InMoment platforms to simply but powerfully compile your needed data and take your business to the next level.

Primary research is invaluable when it comes to market research and giving customers the best possible experience with your brand. Learn how InMoment can help you gain the most insight out of your primary research surveys!

In this Post

What Is Primary Research?Primary Research Methods and Examples Advantages and Disadvantages of Primary Research Primary Research Vs. Secondary Research Primary Research with InMoment

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Updated January 28, 2025

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 9 minutes

How to Improve Customer Retention

There is something to be said about how vital it is to leverage market research to understand your non-buyers so you can convert them into customers. But focusing on how to improve customer retention is just as important, if not more. It is more profitable to invest in existing customers, especially since acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

The market may be vast, but there is a finite number of potential customers, so making a good lasting impression is key to keeping the customers you have already won, regardless of the industry you’re in. That is why your customer retention efforts are so important.

What Is Customer Retention?

The definition of customer retention is pretty simple: it’s your business’s ability to keep your existing customers coming back to you time after time. But with such a crowded market, that is easier said than done.

Did you know that the average business today loses between 10-30% of its customers annually? Additionally, research by CarlsonMarketing shows that U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every five years.

The fact of the matter is that today’s customers have more options than ever before when it comes to purchasing products and services. So, if you aren’t working purposefully to keep those customers, it’s likely they will go somewhere else.

How Is Customer Retention Measured?

We’ve already mentioned a few customer retention statistics, so you might be wondering how those are calculated. Well, let’s do some math here.

Assume the following definitions:

CE = The total # of customers when the period ends
CN = The total # of new customers that you acquired during the period
CS = The total # of customers at the beginning of a period

To calculate retention rate, you need to use the following equation:

Retention Rate = ((CE-CN)/CS)) X 100

What Is Considered a Good Customer Retention Rate?

It goes without saying that a retention rate of 100% is virtually impossible. But a “good” retention rate is highly varied by the industry you’re in. Here are some industry-average customer retention rates for you to benchmark against:

Industry	Average Customer Retention Rate (%)
Media	84
Professional Services	84
Automotive and Transportation	83
Insurance	83
IT Services	81
Construction and Engineering	80
Financial Services	78
Telecommunications	78
Healthcare	77
IT and Software	77
Banking	75
Consumer Services	67
Manufacturing	67
Retail	63
Hospitality, Restaurants, Travel	55

Why Is Customer Retention Important?

Regardless of the industry you’re in, retaining your customers should be one of the top four goals of your overall business (alongside acquiring customers, increasing customer lifetime value via cross-sell and upsell efforts, and reducing operating costs). After all, it is your customers that keep you in business.

If you fail to keep track of your customers, their experiences, and how many of them are staying with you versus leaving for a competitor, you could be bleeding customers (and money) without even realizing it. Need some more convincing? Here are some additional facts for you:

68% of sales come from recurring customers
Loyal customers are more likely to share their experience with the company and they are also more likely to purchase from the company again in the future
Loyal customers who continue to support your brand will increase your profits
iLoyal customers will also recommend your brand and give positive reviews to their family and friends”
Returning customers tend to spend more on your brand over time.
You get a greater return on your investment (ROI) from repeat customers than trying to acquire a first-time customer
Even though only 12% to 15% of customers are loyal to a single retailer, they represent between 55% to 70% of the retailer’s sales.

How to Improve Customer Retention

The most effective way to improve customer retention? You guessed it! By leveraging your customer experience (CX) program. Your CX program gives you direct insight into how satisfied your customers are with their experience, and then identifies the areas in which you need to improve in order to keep those customers.

There are four cornerstones of customer retention that your CX program helps to support. They are:

Understand Why Customers Leave

Exit Interviews: Drive true learnings from the people who understand why customers leave the most (ex customers)
Market Pulse Programs: Stay ahead of the competition and learn from our competitor’s customers, other industry customers, and identify other opportunities in the market.
Invest in the Right Analytics: Predictive models help to extend lifetime value (LTV) by warning you when specific customers are likely to churn

Eliminate Customer Friction

Customer Journey Mapping: Understand moments of impact and potential frustration across your customer journey
Employee Forums: Access the employee perspective—and socialize that perspective up the chain of command to create effective change
Leverage All Information Sources: Look beyond traditional surveys to include other forms of experience data, such as social data, review site data, operational data, and more!
Deploy Microsurveys at Key Touchpoints: Get customer feedback in the moments that matter

Recover Customers Effectively

Closed Loop Programs: Address concerns when it matters most
Multichannel Listening: Fix broken processes before they become retention detractors
Empower Employees: Encourage and train your employees to use their best judgment and make things right without layers upon layers of approval

Drive Deep Relationships

Support Teams Consistency: Identify fundamental customer needs and create customized value and benefits
Formal Relationship Surveys: Create goal-oriented relationship surveys; look for churn warning signs specific to your business
Leverage Loyalty Programs: Leverage your best customers to be your most outspoken advocates

Calculating the Value of Customer Retention Using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

At InMoment, we frequently sit down with brand executives and look at real-time metrics that show how much revenue has been recovered due to their closed loop program. Here is the equation we use to prove that value.

Begin with the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer— for example, a prominent pizza chain has publicly stated that their LTV of each customer is $10,000. So, let’s use that for our example. Because your CX efforts are listening to the voice of your customer across all channels, you have the ability to report that last week (hypothetically) you had 300 service lapse incidents across your digital and retail journeys. Multiply that 300 by your customer LTV of $10,000 and you now have $3M of at risk revenue. (Yikes!)

Studies tell us that 50% of those customers will continue to do business with your brand, however, 50% will defect—this is where your closed loop program comes into play. If we resolve the issues with half of that 50% that might defect, we know we have recovered $750,000 of revenue across your brand just in the last week!

From these numbers, it’s clear that, although it can be complex, focusing your efforts on improving customer retention is well worth it! And if you’re using your customer experience program to guide you, you’re sure to create the types of experiences that keep customers around for a lifetime!

To learn more about how to improve customer retention, download this whitepaper that teaches you how to use your customer experience program to improve customer retention and become a revenue generating machine!

In this Post

What Is Customer Retention?How Is Customer Retention Measured?What Is Considered a Good Customer Retention Rate?Why Is Customer Retention Important?How to Improve Customer Retention Calculating the Value of Customer Retention Using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

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Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 5 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

What Is Sentiment Analysis? Definition, Types, Importance, and More

There is so much more to communication than just the words we say. Take sarcasm, for instance. Sarcastic comments often rely heavily on irony, conveying the opposite meaning from the one being directly expressed. But this irony is hard to convey without the added benefit of voice inflection and bodily cues (which is why it can be so problematic when someone tries to be sarcastic in a text message or email).

At the same time, non-verbal cues may even go so far as to reveal deeper meaning even beyond what a person intends to express—lack of eye contact during a conversation may indicate that one is uncomfortable with the situation while leaning forward can mean that they are actively engaged and paying attention. In fact, studies suggest that as much as 90% of communication is non-verbal. And while there’s some debate over the accuracy of that number, no one can deny that there’s more in what we say than is carried in the words we speak (or type).

This can create real problems for your business. Given that most customer feedback is text-based (such as emails, social media posts, surveys, in-app feedback, SMS, live chat, etc.), it can be extremely difficult to discern the actual meaning behind the words. To keep up with expectations and provide a positive customer experience, companies in all industries need a more accurate way to understand and categorize their customer feedback. This is where sentiment analysis comes into play.

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a term that describes the tools and strategies designed to help organizations extract unspoken meaning and emotion from text. By using sentiment analysis to contextually mine written communication for subjective information, your business can gain a greater understanding of how your customers view your brand, services, products, and more.

At its most basic, sentiment analysis can, with reasonable accuracy, determine whether written or spoken feedback should be classified as favorable, unfavorable, or neutral, and how intensely that sentiment is being expressed.

To make this possible, sentiment analysis is generally supported by sentiment scoring (also called polarity analysis). Often the polarity or overall sentiment is expressed using a numerical score ranging from -100 up to 100, with 0 representing a completely neutral sentiment. This kind of sentiment analysis scoring can be applied to specific phrases or points in the customer feedback or may be calculated for the entire text. Thus, your organization can apply sentiment analysis to create a mathematical data model representing the overall opinions or attitudes of your customers—either as individuals or groups.

But sentiment analysis can also go beyond the basics, picking out subtle clues in messages to help you better understand what your customers are feeling and how you can help them have a positive experience.

How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?

The origin of sentiment analysis as a field of study traces itself back to the mid-20th century, when researchers would comb through and compare written documents to better understand the authors’ intent. But it wasn’t until the advent of digital communication and big data mining that sentiment analysis became a viable business tool. Today, technology advancements in AI, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) make it possible for organizations to mine massive amounts of customer data to gauge public opinion, conduct market research, monitor reputation, and better understand the customer experience.

At the heart of modern sentiment analysis are algorithms designed to automate the identification of text sentiment based on specific methods and analysis models. And although individual organizations may differ somewhat in their approach, most sentiment analysis processes fall into one of three categories:

Machine-Learning Sentiment Analysis

Using automated techniques, machine-learning sentiment analysis allows computer systems to learn from provided texts and apply those learnings to future evaluations. To do this, companies will provide the sentiment analysis model with a training set of natural language feedback that has already been tagged with labels showcasing which words or phrases demonstrate a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. The model takes these correlations and then applies them to new natural language sets.

Over time, the machine-learning sentiment analysis model becomes more effective at automatically identifying emotional sentiment within text.

Rule-Based Sentiment Analysis

Rule-based sentiment analysis relies more heavily on human-built rules to locate hidden sentiment within a text. In its most simple form, the algorithm is provided with a detailed lexicon of possible words, terms, and expressions, with each assigned a sentiment score ranging from negative to positive. Then the algorithm simply tabulates the total score from each word or phrase within the text to determine the overall sentiment of the data set. Rule-based sentiment analysis may require further refining to account for things like idioms, sarcasm, or other unique verbal cues.

Hybrid Sentiment Analysis

For increased accuracy, organizations will often combine rule-based and machine-learning sentiment analysis models to create a hybrid approach to sentiment analysis. This allows the model to retain the statistical accuracy of machine learning while also incorporating hand-written rules for a more stable sentiment analysis solution. In this approach to sentiment analysis, different types of classifiers back each other up, so that if one fails, the next can step in to ensure that no sentiment is overlooked.

Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?

As communication technologies continue to improve, today’s customers expect their voices to be heard. As such, sentiment analysis has grown into an essential tool for monitoring and understanding opinions relevant to business.

Using sentiment analysis to mine these opinions from customer feedback, social conversations, service agent interactions, etc. can give your organization key insights into how customers and other stakeholders feel about your business and its offerings. You can then refine your processes, products, and services to better meet these expressed—and unexpressed—needs. The advantages of effective sentiment analysis range from being able to resolve customer concerns more quickly, to tracking and identifying trends and relevant factors in customer satisfaction scores across predefined periods.

Those businesses that offer a multichannel or omnichannel experience gain further benefits. Sentiment analysis empowers teams to automatically categorize feedback by the channel it was received in, and to develop an accurate picture of customer perception across individual platforms.

Types of Sentiment Analysis

Even within the categories mentioned above, there are different ways to approach sentiment analysis. Some of the most widely used sub-types of sentiment analysis include:

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis tracks emotional sentiment related to specific aspects of a business or its products/services. For example, an organization that rolls out a new feature as part of its app may employ aspect-based sentiment analysis to better understand how users feel about the upgrade. Aspect-based sentiment analysis would identify feedback, comments, and conversations relevant to the new feature and determine whether customer sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.

Clause-Level Analytics

Clause-level sentiment analysis breaks feedback down into clauses rather than sentences. For example, if a customer were to comment that a clothing product they recently purchased “Looks great but isn’t comfortable to wear,” clause-level sentiment analysis could be applied to better understand just how satisfied or dissatisfied the customer is with their purchase. This makes it possible for businesses to correctly categorize responses that may include both positive and negative sentiments in a single sentence.

Emotion-Detection Sentiment Analysis

Emotion-detection sentiment analysis goes further than tracking negative-to-positive sentiment polarity and instead detects the emotional state of the person originating the feedback. Like other forms of sentiment analysis, emotion detection relies on lexicons of emotionally-charged words, machine-learning algorithms designed to detect emotional cues in text, or a combination of both.

Intent Analysis

Customers may reach out to your company or provide feedback for many different reasons—a client who wants a refund will naturally be motivated by intentions that are not the same as those who are merely looking for information. Intent-based sentiment analysis analyzes the objective of the customer, categorizing the message so that it can be more accurately addressed.

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Multilingual sentiment analysis applies the same processes to messages and feedback originating from speakers of more than one language. This adds to the complexity of the algorithms and may require additional processing and resources. In many cases, organizations will train an individual sentiment analysis model to address sentiment in a specific language, rather than attempting to create a model that can analyze sentiment in multiple languages.

Sentiment Detection

Sentiment detection is a form of sentiment analysis used to pick out emotionally-relevant text from neutral or objective information. For example, sentiment detection applied to a movie review would identify “It was exciting” as a positive sentiment while making note that “The run time was 122 minutes” is simply a statement of information with no positive or negative sentiment attached to it.

Smart Text Analytics

Smart text analytics can help you gain vital insights from unstructured feedback. This approach to sentiment analysis breaks down silos and connects data from various sources, applying an AI-based adaptive sentiment engine capable of closely analyzing customer messages to identify trends and themes over time. Click here to learn more.

Sentiment Analysis Examples

At the end of the day, most forms of sentiment analysis are tied directly to the words and phrases customers use when they discuss your brand, its business policies, and the products or services you offer. With this in mind, let’s take a look at some examples of sentiment analysis, and why some feedback may be easier to classify than others.

“I love how the new menu is arranged!”
The sentiment here is fairly straightforward; the customer is expressing a positive feeling and providing clear feedback. Most sentiment analysis tools would have an easy time identifying the sentiment.
“Oh man, I sure do love how you increased all the prices. Thanks so much for doing your part to drain my wallet.”
The sentiment in this feedback is more difficult to identify from the text alone, requiring a more in-depth sentiment analysis. Although the customer is using positive terms (“love,” “Thanks”), they are clearly intending to convey a negative response.
“I’m not unhappy with how the product looks.”
The feedback here uses a double negative to indicate that the reviewer is not fully pleased, but also not fully displeased. Poor sentiment analysis of this phrase may incorrectly attribute polarity beyond what is being expressed.
“The new slogan made me 😆.”
Nonstandard characters can present a real challenge for sentiment analysis tools, unless the tools have been trained to recognize the sentiment of these characters.
“The service agent was salty about something.”
Sentiment analysis tools need to be adaptable enough to take into account new slang as it evolves. In this case, the term ‘salty’ may be too new for some sentiment analysis models to accurately identify as a negative.
“The ending of the film was horrifying.”
Often, whether a word or phrase carries positive or negative sentiment depends on the context. In this example, the “horrifying” ending may indicate a positive response, provided that horror was what the viewer was hoping to experience. To identify this, the sentiment analysis tool would need to be capable of taking other factors into account.

In each case, the best sentiment analysis tools are those that can help you see beyond the words, and grasp the meaning and purpose behind your customers’ feedback.

Sentiment Analysis with InMoment

Sentiment analysis can help your business more easily quantify your customer’s experience, providing you with unique insights into your reputation, service, and products. But as digital channels open up ever-expanding sources of customers and user feedback, sentiment analysis tools must likewise scale to meet increased demand. Without the right sentiment analysis solutions, you may find that keeping track of what your customers are saying (and how they are saying it) is prohibitively expensive in terms of cost, effort, and time.

If sentiment analysis is a concern for your business, then we have the solution.

InMoment, the leader in people-oriented text analytics, brings advanced sentiment analysis to businesses in industries around the globe. leveraging industry-recognized metrics and real-time intelligence gathering, combined with powerful survey capabilities across every common digital channel, InMoment sentiment analysis tools give you the power to quickly and easily gather the insights you need to optimize onboarding processes, enhance product experience, improve customer support interactions, and boost customer relationships like never before.

Don’t let hidden sentiments hamper your success. Learn how InMoment’s CXInsight sentiment analysis tool can help you get the most out of your customers’ feedback.

In this Post

What Is Sentiment Analysis?How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?Types of Sentiment Analysis Sentiment Analysis Examples Sentiment Analysis with InMoment

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how InMoment’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Updated August 1, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 10 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How Employee Churn Costs You Money

It turns out that your greatest asset in your efforts to create an excellent customer experience (CX) can actually be one of your greatest costs. What are we talking about? Your employees, of course! And, more specifically, employee churn.

Employees make or break the customer experience, and if they are not satisfied in their position, they can cost you money by negatively impacting customer experiences—or by packing up their bags and going elsewhere.

What Are the Effects of Employee Churn?

Employee churn is complicated. There are so many reasons why employees may choose to leave, whether it’s personal circumstances, career opportunities, or just a negative employee experience.

There are also many different effects to consider when you lose an employee, both tangible and intangible. When you lose an employee:

You Lose:

Existing Customer Relationships: When you lose a customer-facing employee like a salesperson or an account manager, you can also lose their contacts and relationships. Take the example of an auto dealership. Some customers come back again to the same sales person because they have an excellent relationship and know that the experience they receive will be just as excellent. These customers will likely follow that sales person to their next dealership should they decide to move on.
Employee Knowledge and Expertise: We all have been new on the job—and so we all know how difficult and lengthy the onboarding process can be. When employees that have become acclimated to your company and their roles leave, then you lose all the knowledge and expertise those employees have gained. And, you’ll need to start fresh with new employees. Additionally, you remaining employees will miss out on the mentorship of more tenured employees.

You Take on:

Cost to Recruit and Replace: We bridged this subject in the previous section, but losing experienced employees means starting over. And in this economy, finding new employees is much more difficult than it has been in the past. When actively searching to fill a position, you can accrue recruiting costs from promoting your posting on job sites or from using recruiting agencies.
Cost to Train and Develop Knowledge: Recruiting new employees is only the beginning of the costs. Once you’ve signed a contract, then the training begins. Check out the next section to discover how much that can truly add up to!

How Do You Calculate the Cost of Employee Churn?

Now that we’ve laid out how losing employees can cost you, it’s time to calculate that cost down to dollars and cents. Here is a quick equation you can use to add up the exact cost of training employees for your brand:

Sounds like a lot, right? It is! In fact, turnover can cost a company about 33% of an employee’s annual salary, according to Employee Benefits News.

How Employee Experience Programs Reduce Employee Churn (and More!)

When you focus your experience programs on making employees feel heard, removing friction from their everyday lives, and making them feel engaged and inspired by their job, you are investing in keeping employees around. And when you reduce churn, you reduce churn costs!

Here are just a few of the ways employee experience programs can benefit your business:

Retain Top Talent: When you identify barriers that undermine the employee experience, understand why people leave and recover at-risk employees.
Retain Customers: 68% of customers will leave because of poor employee attitude.
Boost Brand Perception: 70% of customer brand perception is determined by experience with people.
Encourage Cross-Sell and Upsell: 41% of customers are more loyal when they interact with employees with positive attitudes.
Decrease Cost to Serve: Higher-quality experiences mean fewer calls to customer care and a subsequent reduction in call center costs.
Increased Profitability: Engage and empower employees to take ownership of profitable CX outcomes. Companies with engaged employees are 21% more profitable.

Want to learn more about how you can boost employee engagement and your bottom line? Check out this free eBook!

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What Are the Effects of Employee Churn?How Do You Calculate the Cost of Employee Churn?

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Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

Shopping for Experiences, Not Products: A Primer on Retail Customer Experience in the Experience Economy

Retail customers’ primary objective used to be providing a great product, but as brand competition fiercens and consumer expectations rise, retailers need to find new, bolder ways to stand out from the crowd. Consumers are no longer satisfied with “just” a product, and are finding different, more fundamental means of identifying (and spending money) with brands.

Retail brands’ primary objective used to be providing a great product, but as competition heats up and consumer expectations grow more complex, retailers need to find new, bolder ways to stand out from the crowd. And that’s why the retail customer experience is more important than ever before.

Consumers are no longer satisfied with “just” a product and are finding different, more fundamental means of identifying (and spending money) with brands.

Andrew Park, Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy & Enablement at InMoment, sat down with The Retail Focus Podcast to break down:

Where customers’ expectations have been
Where they’re going
What retailers can do to keep up with it all

What Is the Experience Economy?

As previously mentioned, customers used to consider a great product the end-all-be-all of an experience, but as those expectations have since evolved—and so must retail brands’ strategy. These days, retail customers prefer to spend money with brands that deliver great experiences, and great experiences go far beyond what’s on a store shelf.

It used to be that a retail experience consisted only of an in-store visit, but in this modern era (and especially since COVID), a customer’s retail experience spans so many different channels. For a customer, their overall experience is informed by a combination of the following:

Brand Identity
Online Reviews
In-App Experience
Website Experience
In-Store Experience
Employee Interactions
And So Much More!

You might sense what we’re getting at here: customers consider experiences to be journeys, not single stops—and brands that fail to approach their experience accordingly won’t be able to differentiate in the experience economy.

For example, an airline may consider a passenger’s flight the extent of that individual’s experience, but this view fails to account for buying a ticket, waiting in the airport, finding a hotel, and all the other parts of the journey besides ‘just’ the flight.

What Makes for a Great Retail Customer Experience Journey?

Brands that focus only on one aspect of the experience are missing a huge opportunity. The winning organizations in the modern experience landscape create journeys that are:

Seamless

Customers should receive the same quality of experience whether they are online, in store or in app. Obviously, there will be some differences in the actual experience (in store purchases provide instant satisfaction, while online requires customers to wait for shipping), but the quality must remain the same.

A positive example of consistency comes from one of our home furnishing clients, who prides itself on the knowledgeability of its staff in store. It wanted to provide that same quality of service on their e-commerce site, and was ultimately able to stand up an online chat that gave its customers instant access to expertise.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s extremely disruptive to a customer when a product’s online and in-store price tags differ. Customers have come to expect seamless experiences—it’s key for brands to deliver on that expectation.

End-to-End

If you’re a regular on the InMoment Blog, you’ll be familiar with our phrase, “design with the end in mind.” And there’s a reason why we return to it time and time again. When it comes to retail customer experience (and really anything in life), if you aren’t actively thinking about your desired outcome when you’re in the planning stages, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll end up with the results you want.

So, when you are designing a customer journey, be sure to think about every step of the process, but especially the end result. Do you want customers to post about their new product? Share their excitement with friends and family? Come back for more next month? There is so much you can do to influence these actions, if only you plan for them.

Consistent

This one is pretty straightforward. If you provide consistently disappointing experiences (out of stock items, check out lines a mile long, etc.) you will be hard pressed to convince customers to return—or make a purchase in the first place. If you provide consistently excellent experiences, customers will be excited for the next time they get to shop with you, they’ll tell your friends about you, and they’ll likely buy more when they shop with you.

Now, creating consistency across multiple locations with numerous employees is a lot of work, but it is so worth it. Our proprietary research has even found that customers will spend more money with a company that provides a great experience. If you’re looking for strategies to increase consistency, check out this post or this post (centered more around your employees).

Say it with us: Designing best-in-class retail customer experience journeys is a worthwhile investment! In our decades of experience working with the world’s best known retailers, we’ve found that great customer experiences have big business pay off in these four areas:

Acquiring Customers
Retaining Customers
Increasing Customer Lifetime Value
Reducing Business Costs

Learn more about how here!

Customers Expect Great Retail Customer Experiences

It’s become common in the last 5-10 years for retailers to be compared not just to each other, but to brands from other industries and the experiences they provide. It probably comes as little surprise to most retailers that customers frequently compare them to Amazon, but what about a restaurant?

Restaurants are not retail outlets, but if they provide a great experience, customers will come to expect similar commitment from retailers and vice-versa. The same is true of other types of businesses. (You can learn more about this cross-industry experience expectations in our Retail Experience Trends Report here.)

The final word here is just that: expectation. As we mentioned up top, customers’ expectations are growing more complex as countless brands vie for their attention. This means that, no matter whether a brand sells shoes, cars, meals, or airline tickets, it’s no longer enough to focus solely on a product.

Make no mistake, offering a quality product is obviously still important, but it’s no longer enough to capture and hold customers’ attention. Experience is the differentiator now, and brands that endeavor to deliver a great experience will come out on top in both their verticals and in customers’ eyes.

To hear more about retail customer experience in the experience economy, listen to the full podcast episode today!

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What Is the Experience Economy?What Makes for a Great Retail Customer Experience Journey?Customers Expect Great Retail Customer Experiences

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CX 101: Sampling Methods

When you want to get information from customers, it might seem nice to be able to ask every single customer. To make that happen, you would need every customer to agree to be surveyed, and it would take an extreme amount of time, effort, and money to then ask every customer your survey questions. Even then, you would have an inordinate amount of data to sift through. It’s true that you could definitively make claims about what your customers are saying, but it’s not actually necessary to go through this level of work. In fact, most likely, it’s not possible to survey every single customer.

Instead of surveying every single person you want feedback from, most people use a concept called sampling instead and rely on sampling methods to research a group. Sampling allows you to get information from a group of people, and when done correctly, the information is also generalizable and usable. We’ll walk you through sampling, types of sampling methods, and how to begin using some of these techniques.

What Is Sampling?

Sampling is using a group of your population to understand the population as a whole. Think of sampling as you would with sampling a cake. To see if a whole cake is delicious, you can usually tell by eating a slice of the cake. That slice of the cake can tell you a lot about the taste, texture, consistency, and overall balance of the cake—and it’s much easier to eat just a slice instead of an entire cake. Sampling for surveys works much the same way.

You take a group of your population and survey just them. It’s typically much more manageable and affordable to do so when you’re doing large scale research. From there, your data team will be able to analyze the data from the sample—which is typically a smaller amount that’s easier to glean important insights from. The insights from sampling—if your sampling is done correctly—can then tell you about the whole group you’re researching. And it can help you gather these insights at a fraction of the cost and much less effort than it would take to survey the entire group.

Difference Between Population and Sample

To better understand sampling methods, it’s important to distinguish between the population and the sample. The population is the entire group of people you want to learn about and to be able to draw conclusions about. For example, if you wanted to determine how your customers felt about a new product, your population would be every single customer that’s purchased the new product from you. If you wanted to research the grocery shopping habits of single mothers, your population would be every single mother.

The sample is a representative group of your population that will be participating in your research or survey. The key is that the sample has to be an accurate representation of your population. For example, if you were researching the grocery shopping habits of single mothers, you couldn’t go to a local grocery store and survey every person who walked in. You would get data, but it wouldn’t be data about the population you’re trying to study. As with the cake analogy, the sample or slice has to accurately represent the entire cake.

It’s important to remember that population doesn’t necessarily mean “big” and sample means “small.” Populations can be defined by so many factors: geography, age, gender, income, and so many more factors. You can have a tiny population of just a particular set of customers or a large population like the entire adult population of North America. The larger, more dispersed, or more diverse your population is, the harder it will be to sample.

What Are Sampling Methods?

When you want to do a survey or perform research, you’ll need to use sampling methods to determine who will be a part of your sample and how it will be related to your population. Carefully consider how you will select a sample that is as representative of your population as possible. In general, there are two categories of sampling methods: probability sampling and non-probability sampling.

Probability sampling is when each member of the population has an equal chance of being selected to be included in the sample. The sample participants are chosen randomly, and the results from the survey are generalizable to the population as a whole. Probability sampling methods are typically more accurate than others, but they are also more time consuming and expensive to make possible.

On the other hand, non-probability sampling is when each member of the population does not have a chance of being selected. With these sampling methods, you could choose your sample based on convenience or other limiting criteria that make it so that every person isn’t eligible to be selected.

For example, if you wanted to study all of your customers, it would be a non-probability approach to then just select a sample of customers who have subscribed to an email list. In this situation, you would be limiting who could be selected to those on a list, which may or may not be accurate to your entire population. With non-probability sampling, it’s generally much more affordable and easier to do research, but you do run the risk of accumulating higher amounts of sampling error and reducing the likelihood of having a generalizable sample.

Probability Sampling Methods

To perform a probability sampling survey, there are several methods that are commonly used. These are some of the most commonly used probability sampling methods:

Simple Random Sampling

Simple random sampling is the simplest way to get a sample where every member of the population had an equal chance of being selected. To do a simple random sample, you will choose a way to randomly select a certain number of people from your population to survey. Some common methods include using a random number generator, drawing a name out of a hat or bowl, or any other type of chance.

For example, you could number each customer you’ve had and use a random number generator to determine who will be a part of your sample. You could use a list generator to select certain customers from a list of names or emails. However you do it, the key is that it’s random.

Systematic Sampling

Using simple random sampling can be extremely time consuming with a large population, so many will instead use systematic sampling. Systematic sampling is using some sort of designated system to choose randomly. For example, you could number all of your customers and choose the tenth individual. Choosing systematically saves you time and effort but still provides you with a random sample.

Stratified Sampling

Stratified sampling is most useful when you have groups of people who should be sampled from equally. First, you divide your population into groups that don’t overlap (i.e. people from one group can’t be in another group). From there, you’ll randomly select a sample from each group.

For example, if you were looking at your customers, you might want to break them up by annual income to see if that affects what you’re researching. Your stratified groups would then be done by income, and you would select a small sample from within each group.

Cluster Sampling

Cluster sampling also involves splitting your population into groups, but these groups should be split randomly if possible. Then, instead of selecting from each group, you will randomly select groups and sample everyone in the group. For example, an airline might randomly select a certain number of flights each day and survey every passenger on those flights.

Non-Probability Sampling Methods

Since probability sampling can be time consuming, some people will use non-probability sampling methods instead. These methods are generally not generalizable to the whole population as they may or may not be an accurate representation of the population.

Convenience Sampling

Convenience sampling is choosing a sample based on ease of access. Instead of choosing from a population randomly, you choose from a population based on who is easy to communicate with. For example, standing in front of a grocery store and surveying everyone who walks past is convenience sampling. Not every member of your population has an equal chance to be chosen, and your data will only represent one day at one grocery store.

Choosing customers based on being subscribed to newsletters or who follow your company on Instagram could also be convenience sampling (if your population is larger than just “those who follow us on Instagram”) because it’s all about ease of access.

Voluntary Response Sampling

Voluntary response sampling is when you select a sample based on who wants to be a part of the sample. The individuals can voluntarily choose to respond or not respond based on a general call for responses. For example, you could send out an email to every customer and ask them to join the study. Those with strong opinions or interest would be the most likely to join, which could mean your population isn’t representative.

Purposive sampling

Purposive sampling selects a sample based on what a researcher decides. Essentially a researcher will be the one to determine if someone is in the sample or not. For example, you could put out a survey, and the researcher would then only look at the surveys for people who they decided met a certain criteria: like having purchased the most recent product.

Snowball Sampling

Snowball sampling is used when a population is hard to reach. For example, if your research requires data from shelterless people, you may have a hard time reaching them for a survey. Snowball sampling is when you use just a few individuals you can find from this group or even choose participants based on whose family or associates you can contact. While snowball sampling isn’t random, it can be useful for certain populations that you may not be able to survey in another way.

The Bottom Line

Overall, there are many sampling methods to choose from when planning your surveys. The end goal is to try to get your sample to be as representative as possible of your overall population, so you can use the results to generalize about the population and make conclusions. Poor sampling will give poor results. After all, as we all know, if we put crappy data in, we get crappy results, which don’t benefit anyone. Choose a representative sample instead for beneficial results.
See how InMoment can help you with your sampling and survey efforts to help you choose the right sampling methods to get a representative sample.

In this Post

What Is Sampling?Difference Between Population and Sample What Are Sampling Methods?Probability Sampling Methods Non-Probability Sampling Methods The Bottom Line

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

4 Ways a Quick Service Restaurant Chain Refreshed a Stale Customer Experience Program

When you think of going to get a quick bite to eat, you’re probably thinking of getting a burger. With so many quick-service restaurant chains to compete with, how can one chain expect to stand out above the rest? One family decided to perfect freshly sliced sandwiches, custom menu items, and a never before seen “light” menu that features low calorie salads and sandwiches. Their revolutionary blend of quick-service speed and made-for-you care helped them create as many smiles as they did sandwiches.

Despite their global and loyal fanbase, the quick service restaurant chain experienced a period of stalled sales and mixed reception to marketing messages. It was this period of confusion that caused them to revamp their menu. But, as the restaurant underwent a massive change, they realized that their current customer experience platform was ineffective. Therefore, along with the refreshed brand, came a refreshed customer experience program. Here are the 4 ways they refreshed a stale customer experience program:

Going from Measuring to Improving
Getting the Right Insights to the Right People
Turning Intelligence into Action
Proving ROI Using Purpose-Driven Results

These four strategies helped this chain go from behind the times to a trailblazing leader in their field by partnering with InMoment. Let’s dive in to see how they did it!

Strategy #1: Going from Measuring to Improving

Before partnering with InMoment, this brand was relying heavily on a cloud-based analytics platform to track store performance. However, what this platform did not measure was the customer experience. This brand was able to tell how many meals were ordered in a day, but not how their customers felt about their meals—and if they had a good experience eating their food in the restaurant.

The brand decided to partner with InMoment based on their ability to implement the quantitative data with customer experience data. InMoment offered them a chance to see a holistic view of individual location performance, automated intelligence informed by data, and employee commitment to enhance the guest experience and drive sales.

Strategy #2: Getting the Right Insights to the Right People

The quick-service restaurant’s InMoment team was able to take advantage of performance data and customer experience data to offer this brand a monthly granular, location-level report.

Using these reports, area supervisors could now conduct quarterly, on-site performance evaluations. Then, InMoment would correlate the audit results with customer experience data in an easy-to-review report that gave actionable coaching insights and suggestions for improvement.

Strategy #3: Turning Intelligence into Action

By sending pertinent data to decision makers, InMoment was able to help the QSR chain foster an environment of growth within the organization. InMoment’s reports—that integrate performance audits and guest experience data—created priorities tied to the greatest return on investment.

But, priorities aren’t chosen solely from data. InMoment also measures brand loyalty drivers such as friendliness, food quality, and cleanliness.

Based on the platform-identified priorities and the data received, the brand was able to leverage InMoment’s tech to empower general managers and area supervisors to select quarterly action steps from a pre-populated library.

Strategy #4: Proving ROI Using Purpose-Driven Results

After implementing these data-driven improvements using the InMoment correlated system, the brand saw a significant increase in key metrics in just eight months; the most notable being a 34% increase in their overall satisfaction (OSAT) score and a 22% increase in product quality.

Through its re-energized approach, this brand understands that every experience matters, and it’s important to get it right the first time. If there’s a problem, it’s acknowledged and fixed.

With the combined incremental value derived from its partnership with InMoment—and

commitment to service excellence—the restaurant continues to inspire smiles through delicious experiences.

To learn more about how InMoment can transform your customer experience, and to learn more about this brand’s journey, read the full client story here!

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Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How Employee Experience Initiatives Help Brands Retain Talent, Grow Workforces, and So Much More

This article probably isn’t the first place you’ve seen the terms “Great Resignation”, “Great Reshuffle” or “Big Quit” on the internet, and from the looks of things, the battle to retail talent won’t settle anytime soon. The causes and effects of employee churn are complicated, but the bottom line for brands and organizations the world over is simple: employee expectations have changed, and workplace cultures’ view of the employee experience must change as well.

You’ve probably seen that writing on the wall ever since The Great Resignation kicked off in early 2021, but if you’re not sure where to start, we have you covered! Today’s conversation briefly touches on how employee experience (EX) programs can help you navigate employee challenges big and small, how EX initiatives interconnect with customer experience (CX) and how all of this can lead to meaningful Experience Improvement!

How We Got Here

The biggest assumption that a lot of the biggest brands have had going for many years is that customers are the most important part of an experience ecosystem. Customers are certainly vital, but we’re going to challenge that long-running assumption by saying that employees are actually an organization’s most valuable asset. Sure, happy customers help a strong bottom line, but passionate, bold, and invested employees are what encourage those customers to keep doing so. Employees are invaluable for creating the human connections that reinforce brand loyalty, which helps your organization stay at or reach the top of your vertical!

One of the reasons we’re seeing the Great Resignation play out so hard for so many companies is that, unfortunately, they didn’t view their employees through this prism. They didn’t adequately invest in employee support resources over a period of years, and when that lack of support came into focus during COVID-19, it was the last straw for many workers. A few other factors have contributed here too, but it all boils down to the fact that employees’ idea of a supportive workplace culture has rapidly changed.

The Rundown on Employee Experience

So, if employees are now expecting deeper and more consistent support from their workplaces, what’s the best way for brands to respond? The phrase “deeper and more consistent support” reads pretty simply on paper, but we all know that’s going to vary wildly from brand to brand, industry to industry. The truth is that there’s no one benefit, idea, or other silver bullet that will guarantee employee retention. Rather, organizations need to go deeper by carving meaningful intelligence out of their employee feedback, then acting upon it.

That advice sounds obvious enough, right? Well, you might be surprised (or not) to learn that a lot of brands and experience platform vendors consider gathering feedback the high water mark of program success, not acting on it. However, numbers and metrics alone aren’t going to get you the employee retention you need to create meaningful experiences—taking meaningful action is the only step that’s going to get you there.

So, with that in mind, shift your paradigm if you haven’t already to designing your experience program with the end in mind. Identify your retention challenges, build your feedback-gathering tools around those challenges, and analyze what your employees are telling you for insights to take action on. This approach differs significantly from what many brands have considered the norm for many years, where they simply inhale mountains of data and then try to scour all of it for any intelligence of value.

Trajectory Takeoff

We’ve talked about how employee experience got here, what employees are expecting from their workplaces, and a top-level methodology for organizations to use as they work to close that gap. But as brands begin gathering data or take a moment to reassess how they’ve been doing it, what type of roadmap might be most helpful for them to stick to as they grow their EX maturity?

Well, we have the answer to that as well! Click here to read a full-length point of view article from expert Michael Lowenstein on the various levels of EX maturity brands can use these ideas to achieve, as well as what each stage of that journey means for your employees, your workplace, and even your customers. Best of luck on the road ahead!

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How We Got Here The Rundown on Employee Experience Trajectory Takeoff

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CX 101: Demographic Segmentation

If you were trying to convince your family to go on a weekend trip, you likely wouldn’t use the same tactics for every family member. Your retired parents may be persuaded by the luxurious rooms at the hotel, but your brother and his spouse probably care more about the activities they could do with their kids. Your college student sibling would likely love the break from school, but they’re more concerned with affordability compared to the rest of the family.

Even within a single family, there are different types of people with different values, concerns, and priorities—now consider how much variance there is in a national or global market campaign. Personality, occupation, and life experience all affect what appeals to a certain person, which is why demographic segmentation is so important in all marketing efforts. Finding out what your audience demographic looks like will help you better understand the needs of your target customers, create more specific solutions, and market those solutions better.

There are 4 different types of segmentation: demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral. Demographic segmentation is just one part of the puzzle, but an essential tool for competitive marketing, especially in the digital space. This article will go over everything you need to know about demographic segmentation and how to take your business to the next level with advanced demographic analysis technology. But first, let’s go over the basics.

What Is Demographic Segmentation?

Demographic segmentation is a method of grouping a target audience or customers by specific traits, most often by age, gender, occupation, income, socioeconomic background, and family status.

If your product or service is meant for luxury and comfort but comes with an expensive price tag, you would want to target high-income households. If your product or service is mostly bought by women, you want to be able to market to them specifically. Let’s say you sell solar panels; the demographic for your product is warmer climates, and knowing that allows you to segment that group of people and market to them while avoiding the uninterested ones. Once you’ve identified the right group, it’s much easier to target their needs and appeal to their preferences.

By dividing the market audience into smaller and more specific categories, businesses can better define who their audience is and ultimately funnel their messaging and resources into focused and effective strategies. The prospective market is clearer, current customers are more accurately advertised to, and businesses can personalize the experience of their brand for each segmented audience.

Not only can you use demographic data to identify and isolate customer groups, but you can also use demographic segmentation for UX design, brand positioning, CX, and other analytic tools that assist with business strategies. The most competitive businesses that are seeing success from their marketing efforts gather demographic data using analytics software, consumer insights, and census data.

Benefits of Using Demographic Segmentation

Using demographic segmentation isn’t just beneficial—with the rise and projection of digital marketing, understanding the traits of your target audience is becoming more essential. Here are five more benefits of using demographic segmentation to hone your target audience research.

Personalization and Relevance

When you segment your audience based on accurate demographic data, you can advertise and communicate with each group according to their preferences and values. That means your messaging, the pain points you solve, and the features you highlight can be different (and more effective) for each audience. Your products or services can be relevant to a range of audiences, but your message won’t resonate exactly the same with every person in that range. To be relevant and persuasive, a customized approach is best.

Optimized Marketing Strategies

It may seem like going after such specific audiences limits your reach to potential customers, but the opposite is true. By segmenting your target audiences into demographic groups, you can identify common threads within each group and offer more satisfying content or ads. Targeted ads that are especially polished will also increase the visibility of your brand and products, so you will have greater volume and more impactful ads that convert for the right group.

Improved Products or Services

The more you know about the needs of your customers, the better you can serve them by offering improved products and services. For example, a company could learn through demographic analytical tools that the shaving cream they originally advertised for men is actually being bought and used by more women. This would allow the company to tune its product offering for its female audience.

Increased Customer Retention

When the customer experience is better than ever, so are customer satisfaction and loyalty. Knowing what someone needs is a powerful tool when it comes to both business and marketing. By providing improved products or services and personalized solutions, especially over time, customers will return to that company. Customized solutions also add a personal touch to your brand, which is something most customers appreciate and want more of.

Data-Driven Decision Making

It’s much easier to make a decision about what your marketing budget should go to if your audience groups are crystal clear. Instead of putting money and time towards potential customers that you aren’t sure about, you can have a strong idea of the products and solutions specific demographics need.

It’s of course important to remember that demographic information is still working off certain assumptions. However, relying on time-tested statistics gives you much more direction and surety than blindly hoping your message or offering is well received by someone. Intentional and evidence-based advertising is far more effective, which is what demographic segmentation can help with.

What Variables Are Included in Demographic Segmentation?

Many variables can be used in demographic segmentation, but here are the most common and relevant ones, depending on the industry.

Age: People have different experiences, desires, and priorities depending on their age. You wouldn’t advertise a dentist’s office to a tween the same way you would to an adult. You also have to consider someone’s level of work and life experience, which often comes with age.
Gender: Men and women share many needs, but there are some needs or appeals that tend to lean one way or the other. A nail salon likely gets more women customers than men, so while they may get both, they may want to focus their efforts on the women in their area. But beware of harmful stereotypes—there are plenty of sales pitches that have no need to advertise to only men or women.
Ethnicity: Ethnic backgrounds can greatly affect something’s appeal or even its appropriateness. Many ethnic groups take great pride in the traditions of their community and culture, so it’s important to know who you’re talking to so you can actually address their unique needs.
Income, Occupation, and Education: Money isn’t everything, but it is an important demographic factor. People in different income brackets save and spend their money differently, so to get the right eyes on your products. It’s important to consider who really wants and can afford what you’re offering. Similarly, a blue-collar worker compared to a professor at a college may even make the same amount of income but have totally different types of education and experience, so each customer type would need to be marketed to differently.
Religion: Faith is a big part of many people’s lives, and similar to ethnic appeals, you want to be careful that you’re properly advertising to certain groups to avoid offending or alienating your target audience.
Family Structure and Marital Status: It’s wise to look at large families compared to couples or single people. If you only advertise your product to families but your product could easily be helpful to a single person, you may be missing out on an opportunity. On the other hand, you may have a more niche market, such as a jewelry store, so couples getting engaged would be far more relevant for your marketing efforts. Children are a huge part of many parents’ lives, so it’s important to factor them in as well.
Sexual Orientation: With such a broad spectrum of sexualities and preferences, it’s important to be inclusive to all while recognizing what a specific group of people may need or like. If a lot of your customers come from a progressive and urban city, it’s going to be important for most of them to see representation in your advertisements.
Residence Environment and Location: Speaking of urban cities, where someone is located, whether urban or rural, plays a big role in someone’s preferences. A lot of people in the city don’t drive a car and instead use public transportation, but others that live in the country desperately need their vehicles to get to their jobs every day. How a car dealership markets its cars could drastically change based on who is looking for a car.

More Demographic Segmentation Examples

Here are some examples of demographic segmentation and how it can change the way a company approaches its audience, marketing strategies, and customer experience.

Location: Save Money and the Environment

Let’s use the solar panel example we talked about earlier. Solar companies need to mainly advertise to people in places that get a lot of sunshine. However, solar panels have many benefits, like how they save money on electricity and make less of an impact on the environment. Based on their demographic information, a solar business can adjust their messaging to what’s actually relevant to them. People that live in rural single-family homes and use a lot of electricity will be interested in the savings, while green thumbs—often living in the city—are going to appreciate the environmentally friendly attributes of solar.

Family Status: A Versatile Vehicle

If a car company has a spacious vehicle with a lot of storage and seating, it could appeal to big families who have a lot of children to get around. On the other hand, a small business owner who transports their products everywhere by themselves could also use a spacious vehicle—but the car company would need to market differently to these two potential customers. With demographic segmentation, the company could create two different advertising campaigns, one that focuses on family values and authentic family living versus a woman running her own business independently.

Diversity: Take a Walk in Their Shoes

Foot Locker, a global shoe store, used personalized customer experiences to better their service since it had a broad range of customers with a lot of customer feedback and surveys. Outside of their typical customers, they also had elderly customers, guests with disabilities, non-sneakerheads, and customers with diverse interests. By analyzing their demographic data, they were also to customize both the in-store and online customer’s journey for different demographics, which was better for the brand and the consumer.

InMoment Can Help with Demographic Segmentation

If you’re ready to upgrade your marketing and other demographic tools, it’s time to partner with InMoment. InMoment has the Customer Experience Cloud that helps you perform demographic analysis and segmentation so that you can give your customers the best CX possible.

Book a demo to see how InMoment’s CX Cloud can help you optimize demographic segmentation, improve the solutions for your customers, and make the most of your marketing funds!

In this Post

What Is Demographic Segmentation?Benefits of Using Demographic Segmentation What Variables Are Included in Demographic Segmentation?More Demographic Segmentation Examples InMoment Can Help with Demographic Segmentation

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Updated January 21, 2025

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 9 minutes

How Financial Services Brands Can Grow Share of Wallet with Their CX Program

Growing wallet share is one of the most important business initiatives for financial services companies. Here's how you can leverage your customer experience program accomplish your mission.

Financial services brands are facing more complex challenges than ever before, especially when it comes to customer experience (CX) and growing share of wallet. Additionally, the added stress of today’s economy and the fall out of a global pandemic makes finance an even more sensitive topic for customers than usual, making the experiences brands even more pivotal.

Luckily, there is good news for brands even in these troubled times—if they play their cards right, they can use their experience programs to not only create great experiences for customers, but also grow their business simultaneously.

There are four key business goals finserv brands can accomplish with their CX programs (we talk about them in our latest eBook here), but today we are going to focus on just one: growing share of wallet.

The Importance Share of Wallet (and How Your CX Program Can Help)

Growing your share of wallet can be achieved by growing your customer base (acquiring new customers or expanding the financial institution’s geographic or product/service footprint) or by capturing a greater share of current customers’ financial wallet with additional products and services.

Growing wallet share means more than just maintaining the customers you already have—it means understanding if they are also utilizing services from your competitors, which services, and why those customers are going elsewhere. With this knowledge, you can make changes that help you go from being one of a few brands a customer utilizes to the only brand your customers trust.

Being your customer’s one and only has some major implications for your bottom line. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, if your brand is one of only two a customer uses for a given purpose, the difference between being their first choice and being their second choice can mean that “half of each dollar you could be collecting from the customer is going to your competitor instead.”

With the right CX program, however, you can narrow that gap. Here are two specific examples of how experience tools can be leveraged to grow wallet share:

CX Benefit #1: Acquire More Customers

Customer acquisition is one of what we at InMoment like to call the four economic pillars of customer experience return on investment (ROI). Why? Because it’s absolutely key to making sure that your CX efforts (along with marketing campaigns, promotions, and more) are paying off.

Understanding the effects your actions as a brand have on different customer segments is crucial, as it allows you to further target your initiatives. You can then acquire more of that type of customer, then quantify the value of those new customers for your bottom line.

For example, an InMoment client sought to capitalize on acquisitions by optimizing its surveys to find new types of customers. By targeting respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 with specific questions, the company was able understand this demographic and what drove it so that this intelligence could be included in the brand’s expansion initiatives.

The practitioners who ran this initiative were then able to prove its worth by tracking the new customer acquisition, increases in unique customers, and market share growth that it generated.

CX Benefit #2: Understand How You Measure Up

Equally important to acquiring more customers is understanding what your competitors are doing that convinces those individuals to choose a brand other than yours. Understanding competitive differentiation in terms of brand, experiences, and product and servicing offerings can inform the organization on target audiences, competitive customers who are most vulnerable, and how to position the organization’s product and servicing offering in the most attractive way.

With competitive perceptions, a financial institution may find a specific opportunity to attract competitive customers who may not be happy with the digital offering available with a current provider. An institution may also spot a chance to attract customers’ attention with a specific product offering targeting their defined needs.

For Financial Services, Intelligence Is Key

There are plenty of other benefits a CX program can bring to a financial services brand, but they all have one thing in common: intelligence.

With an experience initiative that is able to collect data from anywhere and everywhere, apply powerful technology, and give you access to experts who can guide you on your journey, you gain the kind of intelligence that helps you make informed decisions about your experience. And when you make informed decisions, you can truly delight your customers and transform your business. Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it?

Want to learn about the other three business goals financial services brands can accomplish with their CX program? Read the full eBook here for free!

In this Post

The Importance Share of Wallet (and How Your CX Program Can Help)For Financial Services, Intelligence Is Key

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Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Updated August 12, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

9 Must-Read Articles on EX, Linking EX & CX, and Branded Experience

Organizations around the world are actively evaluating—and seeking to better understand—the decision-making and behavioral influence of employee and customer trust, the drivers of emotional bonding with a brand or company, and what is required to create and sustain a more valuable branded experience.

If these topics are on your company’s radar, you can get the answers you need here! In today’s post InMoment EX and EX-CX linkage expert Michael Lowenstein is sharing his thought-leading insights on just those subjects. Check out these must-read articles!

What Are Survey Templates?

What Are the Different Types of Survey Templates?

How Can I Create a Survey Based on a Survey Template?

Interested in using InMoment’s survey templates to take your business to the next level? Check them out here!

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Thank you

2025 Consumer Trends Report

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Thank you

What Is Primary Research?

Primary Research Methods and Examples

Surveys

Interviews

Observations

Focus Groups

Research Services & Data Analysis

Advantages and Disadvantages of Primary Research

Advantages

Disadvantages

Primary Research Vs. Secondary Research

Primary Research with InMoment

In this Post

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

See Our Software in Action

What Is Customer Retention?

How Is Customer Retention Measured?

What Is Considered a Good Customer Retention Rate?

Why Is Customer Retention Important?

How to Improve Customer Retention

Understand Why Customers Leave

Eliminate Customer Friction

Recover Customers Effectively

Drive Deep Relationships

Calculating the Value of Customer Retention Using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Thank you

2025 Consumer Trends Report

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Thank you

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?

Machine-Learning Sentiment Analysis

Rule-Based Sentiment Analysis

Hybrid Sentiment Analysis

Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?

Types of Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Clause-Level Analytics

Emotion-Detection Sentiment Analysis

Intent Analysis

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Detection

Smart Text Analytics

Sentiment Analysis Examples

Sentiment Analysis with InMoment

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Thank you

2025 Consumer Trends Report

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Thank you

What Are the Effects of Employee Churn?

You Lose:

You Take on:

How Do You Calculate the Cost of Employee Churn?

How Employee Experience Programs Reduce Employee Churn (and More!)

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Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

See Our Software in Action