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!
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!
Top Articles on EX, Linking EX & CX, and Branded Experience
#1: The Future Role of Consumer Trust
Stakeholder (customer and employee) trust is about performance consistency and reliability, active 360 degree communication, and emotional security on an individual level, and humanized processes which lead to desired outcomes. It’s based on perception of personal value delivery relative to expectations. Like a bank or investment account, employee and customer trust is earned; and it can build, or decline, over time as the totality of experience unfolds.
Trust is considered to be a “feeder” emotion, actively contributing to an overall perception of experience value, which, to help assure success, must become part of how organizations design experiences for both customers and employees. It is evident in both b2b and b2c products and services, everywhere around the globe. In some industries, such as financial services, trust has particular importance, especially concerning brand image and optimized relationships..
#3: The Customer Behavior Consequences of Low and High Employee Trust
A high percentage of U.S. employees simply don’t trust their employer. This has a direct impact on employees’ perceptions and behavior, on their level of commitment to the company and also its customers. There are progressive organizations, such as Zappos, that focus on mutual trust between employer and employee. At very high levels, trust can help produce a corps of employee advocates (aka ambassadors in the post), making them active, contributing partners in a shared destiny with their employer.
#4: What if Employees Don’t Support Brand and CX Initiatives?
As organizations design brand and customer experience initiatives and programs, there is often tacit belief that employees will indirectly and directly support such efforts. It has frequently been demonstrated, however, that neutral or uncommitted employees can withhold their support and/or participation, even being negative in this regard. Without multi-level employee commitment (to the organization, its product/service value proposition, and its customers) these programs can be in jeopardy of not meeting business outcome goals
#5: The Positive and Negative Emotions of Employees and Customers
Going beyond traditional quality-related and tangible aspects of value to behavioral drivers, there are 20 stakeholder experience-related emotions, which can be applied to deeper understanding of decision dynamics. Eight of the emotions are negative (stressed, frustrated, unhappy, etc.) and twelve are positive (safe, trusting, energetic, etc.). At the pinnacle of positive emotions are ‘happy’ and ‘pleased’, and this can be expressed in experience through the concept of lagniappe, essentially purposeful overdelivery of value.
#6: Emotional Drivers Shared by Employees and Customers
Getting at the “feelings”, drivers of underlying customer and employee emotions, has seen growing importance. Though this has been slower to develop on the employee side, changes in consumer and marketing dynamics have resulted in significantly increased focus on how emotions shape, and are shaped by, experience. For both groups of stakeholders, the key priorities are to create, support, and leverage trust and value, through several techniques: transparent and frequent communication, understanding of behavioral influences, etc.
#7: The Importance of Brand Image in Shaping Perceived Value and CX
Corporate and brand image is a key, though less studied, element of perceived stakeholder value and overall experience. Research has demonstrated, for example, the strong correlation of brand and product reputation through online reviews and resultant sales. On the employee side, this impacts recruitment and retention. For both customers and employees, there is also evidence of downside performance due to impaired or poor reputation. Proactive organizations, understanding this, have taken an array of steps to protect image and reputation.
#8: Creating Emotional Value for Customers and Employees
Many companies have tactically elected to apply traditional engagement approaches in the belief that these will enhance employee and customer behavior. However, more progressive and advanced organizations have learned that stronger value and business outcomes, for both stakeholder groups, are realized by creating emotionally-based commitment and advocacy behavior. The proof is that the most successful organizations reach higher levels of perceived value, performance, and financial results through such contemporary means.
There are organizations, such as IKEA, for example, where the experiences created for customers are meant to be personally bonding and immersive – through product design, employee interaction, and the overall store visit. It is, in effect, a ‘branded customer experience’, distinctive and unique to this retailer. Examples are offered of B2B and B2C companies that have transcended from transactional, commoditized experiences and now offer branded differentiation with higher perceived value—for both employees and customers.
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In our last blog about creating an excellent food service customer experience (CX), we talked about how vital customer reviews are to growing your business (and how your customer experience plays a pivotal role in making sure your reviews are positive).
It’s clear the customer experience is vital for any food services business, and in our decades of experience working with the world’s best brands, we’ve noticed a common challenge: food service customer experience data is often very siloed from department to department, and team to team. Too often customer experience data isn’t being shared or leveraged across departments, even though there is tremendous value for all departments to make business decisions that either cut costs, help to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and grow the lifetime value of your loyalists.
In order to win in a competitive market, all departments need to have a sense of ownership in the customer experience. Every team should be able to explain how their role connects to the customer and to the customer feedback, from the front line to operations. We are going to walk through how different departments can benefit from customer feedback and some examples of how it can be used.
How Five Different Departments Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Food Services Brands
#1: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Operations
In food services, operations managers are typically concerned with hiring and training employees, coordinating work and schedules, developing working relationships with front and back of house staff, and more. Where customer feedback can help with these responsibilities is by promoting an internal culture that puts the customer at the center. Your employees need to be on board with what you are trying to accomplish with your customer experience efforts from day one, and giving them a window into the end customer is one way to do that!
Building employee buy-in comes from rallying around the employees. This can be done in a variety of ways. One example of this comes from an InMoment quick service restaurant (QSR) customer who has had great success by building an employee Facebook group to share success stories. This keeps employees engaged and aware of what is happening within the company, and helps to inspire them to create great experiences.
Another example of how to rally employees around the customer experience is by using a solution like Moments. Moments from InMoment helps you to build a meaningful experience culture and inspire employee advocates for your program. Moments is available in an app, allowing you to surface valuable comments in an Instagram-like feed, so your teams have access to customer feedback anywhere they go!
Additionally, customer feedback also helps food services brands to ensure quality customer experiences at scale and across locations. For example, a globally popular restaurant chain and InMoment customer previously used mystery shopping techniques to gather data before partnering with InMoment. Mystery shopping gave this business very limited data that they only had access to once a month. With InMoment, they are able to show stores how they rank on key metrics such as friendliness and value. And, as this program has progressed, they are able to draw correlations between stores that are performing well in the system and their sales.
#2: Leveraging Customer Feedback in H.R.
The best way to use customer feedback in human resources is to highlight employee success. Research shows that 79% of employees who quit their jobs say that they didn’t feel appreciated. Knowing this, an InMoment QSR customer built an employee recognition page on their company intranet to recognize employees! This page quickly became the most-read page on their website.
By highlighting employee success, you will be able to reduce turnover, which means not having to spend the money on training new employees. Our QSR clients say training a new employee can cost them an average of $1900! By reducing turnover, you’ll not only experience significant cost savings, but you’ll also have more tenured employees that create the best customer experiences. And we don’t know about you, but lower costs and better experiences sounds like a whole lot of value to us!
#3: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Finance
Using customer feedback in finance may sound obscure, but it may be one of the best ways to help your business succeed. By listening and digesting customer feedback, you’ll be able to recover at-risk revenue. You can identify where you may be losing customers and reach out to recover them.
It will also help you build a high sales potential. Forrester research shows that customers who receive positive experiences are 2.7xs more likely to spend more with a brand. By curating a positive experience, customers will be more inclined to revisit and spend more with your business.
Furthermore, if customers receive a positive experience, they are more likely to talk about it. Research shows that 3% of CX-fueled revenue is from word of mouth.
#4: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Development
It is important to be aware of where your customers are coming from in order to promote the growth of your business. As a QSR owner, you should be able to look at a map and point to where your customers are coming from. If not, you need to be leveraging customer surveys to answer those questions.
Once you are able to pinpoint where your customers are coming from, you can use it to inform your business decisions. Are you planning on expanding and opening new locations? Your customer feedback will help you decide where to put your stores.
Leveraging customer feedback not only helps you sustain your current business, but also helps you grow and build your business.
#5: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Marketing
Any time you unveil a new item, promotion, or special, the customer needs to be at the heart of that campaign.
A globally popular restaurant chain and InMoment customer recently tested new menu items out in their stores. The company thought it was time for a change, and ended up replacing two items that had been on the menu for years. After taking these older items off the menu, they quickly received heaps of customer complaints asking them to bring those items back.
For marketers, customer feedback helps you to bridge the gap between what you perceive customers want from your brand, and what they actually need from you to keep coming back for more.
Everyone Owns the Customer Experience—And Everyone Can Benefit
In order to deliver on customer expectations, every department needs to have a line of sight into the customer experience. The information you receive from customers needs to be shared with all other departments and teams, not siloed in different departments, otherwise, you could be sitting on insights that could make a huge difference in your bottomline. When you break down those silos and create channels of communication across departments, your business will see more success in the areas that matter most!
For more information on using feedback throughout your organization, read our ebook here!
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A global grocery retailer was facing the uncertainties of COVID-19 and through their struggle, they found a perspective that helped them focus on forwarding progression throughout the pandemic. The grocery chain is known for its simple and continuous efforts to always improve, and that consistent effort through the decades has helped to expand its market position. The ongoing and steady growth is proof that the brand’s intention where quality is concerned has greatly paid off.
The Opportunity
COVID brought a heightened sensitivity and sense of uncertainty to most of the global grocer’s guests and staff. Along with the rest of the world, the retailer hadn’t experienced a disruptor of this magnitude, which left most scrambling to understand how to best serve their guests and help them feel safe while keeping store doors open.
And while they faced an immense challenge, the retail leader also saw an opportunity to emerge into a post-COVID world equipped with reliable data that would revitalize its customer experience, improve customer retention, and solidify brand loyalty. Moreover, the chain decided to challenge locations to optimize customer experience and increase customer spending.The chain looked at its customer experience through the lens of its business goals. They analyzed key business metrics related to location eciency, staff measures, and stock availability. The big question was, how do customer experience metrics relate to other KPIs, and which customer metric should they focus on to drive customer spending? That’s when they turned to their team at InMoment.
The Impact
By linking current store survey data to financial data, InMoment helped the brand pinpoint areas in specific locations that could increase customer spending. The analysis uncovered that locations with the highest percentages of customer spend had, higher CX scores, lower employee churn, and on average, 34.41% higher rate of positive first impression scores.
The data showed that 64% of customers left a positive in-store survey response, which correlated to an average of 11% higher spending. With this, the retailer knew if it could improve the number of positive in-store customer survey responses by 5%, spending had the potential to increase by +€35m* in as little as six months. The brand leveraged InMoment’s Explore and Coach tools to sort feedback at the highest-performing locations. Ultimately, the chain worked with its InMoment team to identify struggling locations and create an action plan to build opportunities for positive in-store customer experiences moving forward.
The retailer has implemented these measures as a store target in struggling locations, resulting in the proportion of customers leaving positive in-store survey responses increasing by 3% in the first quarter of the push to meet the 5% goal equating to €21m*.
What’s Next
This global grocer continues to see significant growth as it listens and responds to customer feedback. By consistently aiming to put the customer at the heart of the business, the retailer continues forward progression through its insightful approach despite the challenges of a pandemic.
Summary
11% Spend Increase Tied to Positive In-Store Survey Metrics
3% Increase in Positive In-Store Survey Score in the First Quarter
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You don’t just want to appeal to new customers—you also want to keep your current ones coming back again and again. Not only do returning customers require less introduction to your products and services, but they also tend to spend more than first-time customers, too.
One user engagement strategy you can use to boost your customer retention is to make use of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system. Simple to understand, this powerful metric can give you a wealth of information that you can use to improve your brand.
What Is Net Promoter Score?
NPS is a metric designed to measure customer experience. First, you ask your customers a simple question:
“On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend my brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
Then, customers are asked to explain in their own words why they chose the score they did.
From this, you can place your customers on a scale, where anyone who answered between 0-6 is a detractor, 7-8 is passive, and 9-10 are promoters.
In order to get your Net Promoter Score, you take the detractors away from the promoters.
Let’s say you’ve surveyed 100 people. Of these 100 people, 30 are detractors, 40 are promoters, and 30 are passive. That leaves you with:
40 – 30 = 10
Promoters – Detractors = NPS
Determining your NPS is important, of course, but analyzing the open-ended responses to the follow-up question is what will help you understand the “why” behind your score and make NPS feedback actionable.
What Do These Categories Mean?
Promoters
This category (people who selected 9 and 10) are your loyal fans. They’re likely to be repeat customers, often spending more on subsequent purchases. They generally have a positive view of your brand (meaning if they do contact you with a complaints, they’re often more forgiving).
As well as this, they tend to refer new customers to you – accounting for more than 80% of referrals for many businesses – and talk about you on social media/in person. You may see effusive praise, with descriptions like ‘we’ve been able to achieve our goals’ or ‘this is the only software I’ll use’, along with thoughtful suggestions for improvement.
Passives
This group (people who chose 7 or 8) tends to be satisfied, but not in the same way as promoters. They’re happy with their purchase, and they might buy from you again, though not nearly as reliably.
They are unlikely to complain about you to colleagues, but won’t necessarily spend their time singing your praises or talking about you on social media either. They’re also likely to evaluate competitors if they see an interesting advertisement or offer, rather than being wholly loyal to your brand.
Detractors
You might think that a 6 is a high score to count as a detractor, but generally, this group are unhappy customers. Encompassing everyone who chose between 0 and 6, they’re likely to talk badly about you. At the higher end, there might be some positives mentioned, but they’re still going to have complaints. This is where a lot of customer churn and defection comes in.
Sometimes these customers may seem profitable, as many of them may be spending a lot of money with you. However, an NPS program isn’t about the initial revenue generated by a customer or account, it’s about customer lifetime value. Detractors are at risk of leaving your business and can even give your brand a bad reputation (and the lower scorers are likely to be difficult for your staff to deal with at times).
Bain & Company, the originators of the score, consider between +30 and +40 to be a favorable score. (Why are we using +30, not just 30? Because it’s possible to have a negative score if you have more detractors than promoters). As you head up to +50, you’re looking at an outstanding result. If you’re at +80? That’s world class.
However, this will vary based on your industry and your location. Europe and Asia generally mark things more conservatively than the US. So, if you’re comparing your scores to your competitors, make sure you’re looking in the same place rather than at a global average. If your industry is one generally viewed negatively – think debt collection, or property management – then you’re generally going to have lower scores, too.
For this reason, it’s worth investigating NPS benchmarks for your industry, and your location, rather than relying on a general global average. It’s also worth focusing on improving your own score per quarter. If you go from 5 to 15, you may still be below the average, but a jump of 10 points is respectable and means you’re doing the right things.
5 Ways to Use NPS to Boost Customer Retention
Now you know what NPS is, it’s time to take a look at how you can use it to improve your customer retention.
#1: Make Sure It’s Accurate
Firstly, you need to make sure you’re starting off with an accurate assessment. There are a few common mistakes companies make, including:
Asking leading questions on the survey
Promising rewards for higher scores
Using methods that increase bias (like face-to-face rather than anonymous online surveys)
Only surveying happy customers
Asking too many questions at once
Using “set and forget” NPS microsurveys can help you avoid these pitfalls. By starting with an accurate assessment, you can take the right steps. Having a false image of customer success can be harmful, as issues will go unrecognized and unresolved.
#2: Reach Out to Detractors
Responding to the customers who gave you lower marks is beneficial – both for finding out why they gave lower marks, and saving their business.
Contact detractors right away. If you can address their issue right away, you have a shot at keeping them as a customer.
Even if you can’t meet their needs, it is important that their feedback be acknowledged.
If you lack the time to personally reach out to each detractor, you can still mitigate negative feelings by automating your survey response. Send an email right away to thank them for their response, and ask for more feedback.
Reading through detractor feedback, you’ll gain insights into why they wouldn’t recommend you and be able to adjust accordingly. For example, if half of the detractors respond with ‘processing time is far too long’, then you have something to work toward.
Sometimes negative reviews are based on service factors, like the delivery company you used or customer support that is slow to respond. Sometimes, complaints won’t be directly about your business. For instance, if you provide companies with a virtual phone number, you might get complaints about it not working. Changing this can instantly boost results. Create the experience consumers expect by prioritizing improvements, drawn from their direct feedback.
Feed this data back into your product roadmap and to your sales team. Designing new products with these criticisms in mind can avoid the same issues in the future. Meanwhile, it also gives your sales team some leeway on what they can offer in response to these criticisms to overcome them at the point of sale or renewal. It’s an extra handy thing to add to their sales playbook.
For instance, if a customer is concerned about delivery times, give your customer success managers permission to upgrade them to expedited shipping at no extra cost. If they’ve had issues with subscription software, offer them a feature upgrade. All of these solutions can turn your detractors into passive customers – and potentially even promoters.
#3: Learn from Passives
Don’t ignore this group of customers. While detractors are clearly telling you their business is at risk, passives are more likely to silently churn. It is your job to find out why and whether you should focus attention on this group.
Segmenting your NPS feedback by business size or other factors will help you decide how important passive feedback is. If passives reside in important accounts or user groups, you may want to understand the “why” behind their lack of enthusiasm.
One way to do this is to customize the NPS follow-up question. If a customer scores you a 5 or a 6, ask them “What’s one thing we could do better?”
#4: Engage Your Promoters
Not all of your effort should focus on your unhappy customers, however. You know that this category of people has positive things to say about you – so why not turn that into something official?
Reach out to them and ask for reviews or personal testimonials you can use on your website. You might want to automate asking for a review. That way you ask at the right time — moments after a promoter scores you a 9 or a 10!
If you don’t already have referral marketing in place, it’s time to implement it. Roll it out by targeting these promoters, who you know are likely to make use of it.
This encourages customer retention by giving them special offers, but it also boosts acquisition at the same time. For B2B companies, this is especially helpful if some of your customers are well-known in their field, as businesses are likely to respect their opinion.
Referral and loyalty schemes aren’t always well suited to B2B brands, but customer marketing or a VIP program can work instead. Customer marketing seeks to deepen relationships by providing customers with multiple benefits. One such example might be providing access to your product roadmap as part of an advisory council. Alternatively, you could create a VIP ‘space’, where exclusive content and in-person events are offered.
#5: Thank Respondents
Reach out to your loyal customers, and thank them for being so.
Getting an email that says ‘thank you!’ is a great boost and encourages them to remain loyal. Video can improve customer experience, so having a thank you video may be worth the investment – especially if it is personalized or includes some behind the scenes content.
While most of these efforts should target your promoters, some of them can be sent out to your passive base, too – potentially converting those 7 or 8 scores into 9s and 10s. Add value to your initial product through a higher tier service, exclusive access to industry information, or trade-in offers. These methods can tempt passive customers into a deeper relationship with you.
Keep Going
Net Promoter Score shouldn’t be used as a one-off metric, but a regular measurement. To retain more customers, continue to listen to them, learn from their feedback, and take action. NPS is especially helpful for tracking if your tactics are working. You should see an improvement in retention as you begin to implement those suggestions above.
Equally, you might see a drop if something changes, like an operating system update or switching to an IVR system to route customer service calls. By regularly tracking NPS, you’ll spot improvements and problems quickly. You’ll know if something is working or not, and be able to mitigate negative effects as soon as possible.
NPS will help you improve the customer experience you’re providing and that’s the best route to customer loyalty.
Retain more customers with InMoment, the #1 Net Promoter Score platform for SaaS
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Metrics, metrics, metrics. It’s common for frontline employees like contact center agents to be inundated with them—schedule adherence, efficiency, handle time, and hopefully, amid all of that and more, customer experience (CX) metrics. Ostensibly, the goal with this information is to give contact center agents the guidance needed to create Experience Improvement (XI) for customers, but do they have the time and wherewithal to actually sort through comments and data? Should that even BE an organizational expectation?
Having plenty of data and feedback is certainly important, but inundating your contact center agents with it won’t make them better at their jobs. Today’s conversation briefly covers how to actually leverage data by being tactical and thoughtful with what you share with your frontline employees. We’ll also discuss how best to use data to recognize employees for excelling at the executing moments that matter to customers. Let’s get started!
Sharing What Matters with Frontline Employees
There’s no one specific type of information, insight, or data that supports frontline employees across all industries, but there are several high-level principles that brands can bear in mind when determining what those employees need to know. The first north star to aim for with sharing insights to frontline employees is to consider which of those insights will make your employees not just efficient, but actually better at their jobs and at creating Experience Improvement.
Organizations that make compliance and efficiency the high water mark for contact center excellence will not see remarkable agent performance, let alone the Experience Improvement that you need to acquire and retain customers. Finding the insights, data, and comments that will make employees better at their jobs begins with using an Experience Improvement platform to ingest data (especially customer comments) for actionable insights. Many brands end up wasting time by either trying to manually mine insights out of data mountains, or by gathering metrics and then quitting at that point because they think numbers alone can drive success.
The platform approach can help you avoid both of these pitfalls and make the most of all your data—both qualitative and quantitative. Finding relevant and actionable insights in your data will motivate your employees to act upon Experience Improvement opportunities. Enacting this approach will also enable your frontline employees to provide a far superior experience to customers. This strengthens brand connection and creates a customer-centric culture.
The Next Step
Giving your employees the tools to create Experience Improvement is one thing—demonstrating your appreciation for them successfully doing so is another. All of us—frontline agents, supervisors, and business leaders—can take advantage of data and insights that allow us to simply “be better.” However, there’s one more step on that road that is specifically applicable to driving to top-level frontline work: recognition.
This is another area in which brands and experience program vendors underutilize data, unstructured and otherwise. Data is great for strengthening experiences and the bottom line, but with the right plan and structure, it can drive another factor just as if not more fundamental: an employee-centric culture.
Many brands use data to measure employee performance as a matter of course, but tracking something only accomplishes so much. Brands need to go beyond tracking—they must use data to celebrate success, continually create a positive culture, and recognize a job well done.
This is a fundamental component of being human in all of your experiences, and employees who feel both recognized and a part of the company’s success will be all the more effective in their roles. That is the heart of Experience Improvement, creating a customer-centric and employee-centric workplace, and identifying the moments that matter.
The Frontline Insights Universe
While we’ve covered a lot of ground in discussing how to improve and recognize frontline employee performance, there’s a lot more you can find by checking out my full-length point of view article here. I take a deeper dive into communicating insights to frontline employees, as well as additional strategies you can use to improve experiences for customers, employees, and your wider organization!
Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities
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Restaurants are losing some guests before they even walk in the door. So how can they gather the valuable guest feedback they need to attract new diners, satisfy regulars, and turn those negative reviews around? It’s not through guest satisfaction survey questions on a receipt, or a comment card box. Restaurants need to take a proactive approach to guest surveys by meeting diners when and where they’re ready to give feedback and allowing them to only answer questions relevant to their experience.
Many restaurants, including quick service restaurants (QSRs), are highly impacted by online reviews. As of last year, close to 214 million reviews have been posted to Yelp, and 45% of consumers say they’re likely to read a business’ reviews there before visiting. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people now Google a business before visiting—and a whopping 94% say a negative review has caused them to avoid a business altogether.
Negative reviews (and word of mouth) can clearly cause quick service restaurants to lose some guests before they even walk in the door. So how can they stop those reviews before they’re even posted? With a proactive guest experience program that allows them to gather valuable guest feedback and then take the necessary action they need to attract new diners, satisfy regulars, and turn any potentially negative experiences into positive ones.
With this goal in mind, InMoment gathered the three most important steps quick service restaurants can take to achieve better guest experiences in our new eBook, “How Food Services Brands Can Evolve Guest Experience Programs.” Here’s a short preview of what you’ll find inside.
3 Steps to a Future-Proof, Revenue-Driving Guest Experience Program for Quick Service Restaurants
Step #1: Create Operational Consistency
Operations are a critical part of your organization. It is also where many food service providers begin their overall quest to improve the guest experience and help answer questions like:
How do I create a consistent experience between locations?
How do I encourage and enforce positive behaviors in staff?
How do I understand the overall experience guests are having with my brand?
Taking an operational approach is exactly what it implies: it helps food service providers understand where to make operational improvements that result in consistent experiences: clean bathrooms, tasty food, friendly service, and more.
When implementing an operational approach, look for solutions that help provide actionable guidance for employees and program managers with solutions like Integrated Standard Operating Procedures (SOPS) and Customized Action Planning.
Step #2: Optimize Individual Experiences
Once you have mastered the art of operational guest experience, it’s time to take the next step and tackle a more experiential approach. Operational approaches focus on creating a consistent experience for all your guests.
An experiential approach focuses on creating and optimizing a positive experience for each individual guest and answering questions such as:
How do I understand the experience every individual guest has with my brand?
How do I communicate with guests about their experience in a way that works for them?
How do I turn negative guest experiences into positive ones?
How do I incorporate employee feedback to improve the guest experience?
To truly optimize experiences, make sure you’re using a solution that allows you to listen to customers and respond to their individual experiences. To do this, you need to have a guest experience solution that allows you to listen to customer feedback on any and every possible channel, including:
Review sites
Social media
In-App feedback
Third-party delivery reviews
Direct survey feedback
Microsurvey feedback
Employee feedback
Call center data
Video feedback
Loyalty program data
And more!
You can learn more about customer listening best practices in our eBook here!
Step #3: Innovate for Lasting Relationships
With the amount of competition in today’s food service market, creating loyalty with your guests is more important than ever—and the final step in completing your journey from an operational, to experiential, a truly innovative and relationship-based guest experience program.
Ensuring brand loyalty requires creating a high-quality, consistent experience at every touchpoint to answers questions like:
How can I engage the guest in a friendly, authentic way?
How can I give the guest the ability to customize their experience to their specific needs?
How can I demonstrate awareness of the guests’ situation and acknowledge their needs?
How can I create an experience for the guest that is perceived as a personalized experience?
How can I remember the guests’ preferences and anticipate their changing needs?
How can I incorporate guests’ feedback into my business?
When building an innovative, relationship-based guest experience program, look to integrate with loyalty and brand apps, meet guests on their terms, and understand the broader market landscape with tools like multi-touchpoint support and competitive benchmarking.
Guest Experience Is the Differentiator for Quick Service Restaurants
To sum it all up: Restaurants that consistently create high-quality, consistent experiences will separate themselves from their competitors. Want to learn about how the approach we laid out above has helped InMoment clients to gain a reputation for excellent experiences and drive loyalty? Check out our eBook here to read about cutting-edge guest experience solutions and real stories from our world-class customers.
Financial services brands leverage experience programs to understand what their customers need, then create experiences that build trusting, positive customer/brand relationships. However, these relationships aren’t the only things experience programs can support for brands.
Financial services brands know that customers take their money seriously, so many of them leverage employee and customer experience programs to understand what their customers need, then create experiences that build trusting, positive customer/brand relationships. However, these relationships aren’t the only things experience programs can support for brands.
In fact, many financial services companies use their customer experience programs as a primary tool to influence key business outcomes. Looking for a few real life examples of how brands have done this? We’ve compiled a quick list of inspiring stories from our finserv clients. Check them out below:
Three Financial Services Customer Experience Program Use Cases
Use Case #1: Empowering Employees
A global senior wealth management firm was able to utilize its CX programs to gather information from up to 150,000 clients annually. The data was tied to client asset information, allowing all portal users to view the opportunities and risks by customer segment. Timely and integrated reports allowed different employee groups to utilize this information, proving that experience initiatives truly empower all employees regardless of where they fall in an organizational hierarchy.
To get even more specific:
Financial advisors were able to identify and save at-risk client relationships, pinpoint opportunities for growth and potential new business, and leverage both the survey process and their own results to market themselves to prospective clients.
Field management was able to prioritize its coaching based on financial advisor survey results, manage key client relationships (in excess of $2 million dollars) at their branch, and foster peer coaching by pairing advisors with different strengths and weaknesses.
Senior management was able to quantify the impact of customer satisfaction on revenue and profit, as well as identify key opportunities at the firm level to improve the client experience and grow relationships
Use Case #2: Preventing Churn
A global financial services firm used its CX solutions to identify customer segments that were most at risk. This effort helped the brand prioritize retention and inspired it to invest in strategies to reduce churn.
By focusing on the customer experience, the company achieved immediate intelligence that it was then able to deliver to the team members who could make a difference, accelerating current and future operations service enhancements. The brand was able to identify the key variables that most impacted loyalty for various customer segments, paving the way for initiatives to enhance the end customer’s service experience.
Use Case #3: Combining CX and EX
One retail financial services firm struggled to retain its members. With customer demand hot on the rise, this fast-growth firm found it difficult to listen and respond to those individuals, but with retention at stake, it got moving on its experience initiatives.
The firm launched more transaction-based listening programs to gather real-time customer feedback and serve as the collective core of its updated CX program. In addition, the brand launched employee feedback programs and a customer relationship survey that would both help it view overall customer health and cross-reference customer and employee perspectives.
This new program launched using greater mobile engagement, text analytics, and case management to close the loop. Within 18 months, the firm expanded the number of products/services per customer household by 16 percent, resulting in a 4 percent increase in loan share of wallet. The brand also increased its customer base by 31 percent and identified specific areas for improvement and expansion based on customer feedback. Wow!
There’s More Where That Came From!
Each of these use cases is incredibly inspiring, but the good news doesn’t stop there. In our latest eBook, we lay out four specific business goals that financial services brands can achieve with their experience programs. You can check it out for free on our Resources page, where you can also find a collection of customer stories that describe how industry leaders make a difference with their experience programs!
It’s been a huge month for those of us in the InMoment Community! We’re always looking for the next opportunity to take Experience Improvement (and the experience industry as whole) to the next level, and this month, we made three major InMoment announcements that tell the world about the next steps in our mission: InMoment’s acquisition of ReviewTrackers, InMoment being named a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms, Q2 2022,” and, finally, the launch of the latest XI Platform capabilities.
Want to know more about these headlines? We’ve put together a quick guide to help you navigate the three latest InMoment announcements and what they mean for you. Keep reading to get the 411!
Your Guide to the Three Latest InMoment Announcements
Announcement #1: InMoment Acquires Leading Customer Review Management Company ReviewTrackers
The InMoment family just keeps growing! Our latest addition, ReviewTrackers, empowers over 175,000+ business locations to better understand and manage their customer reviews across 100+ sites with their review management technology.
InMoment and ReviewTrackers joining forces is great news for today’s brands! Online reviews are a great source of unsolicited customer feedback, and they often offer perspective from a different segment of the customer base than surveys or other feedback channels. The combination of different sources for voice-of-customer provides a more holistic, integrated view of the customer experience, and therefore a more accurate representation of the broader customer experience.
Leveraging InMoment AI, an intelligence layer of the XI Platform that utilizes natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML) to facilitate and automate action, this unstructured data is brought to life.
Now, more than ever, it’s vital to monitor, manage, and respond to online reviews from customers in order to accelerate new customer acquisition and improve customer retention—all while driving more authentic connections with customers. This acquisition empowers InMoment customers to do just that!
Announcement #2: InMoment Named a Leader in People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms Report for Q2, 2022
Our next InMoment announcement covers a report by third-party analyst, Forrester, entitled “The Forrester Wave™: People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms, Q2, 2022.” Forrester Research, Inc. evaluated 13 of the most significant text analytics vendors across 29 evaluation criteria, and named InMoment along with only four other vendors as a Leader in the evaluation.
In its vendor profile of InMoment, Forrester states that the company’s acquisitions of MaritzCX in 2020 and Lexalytics in 2021 are “…paying off—the acquisitions beef up InMoment’s people-oriented text analytics capabilities and enable it to address all relevant use cases (beyond just VOC or CX analytics).” The report states “InMoment XI is a solid choice for customers who want a platform with a well-balanced mix of knowledge and ML-based AI, the ability to deploy OOTB solutions quickly, and deep custom application development capabilities (especially for embedded analytics).”
“We are pleased to be named a Leader in Forrester’s People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms report,” says Mehul Nagrani, General Manager, AI Product & Technology. “It validates for us our approach to providing an integrated platform with deep expertise in analyzing both structured and unstructured data, and reflects the hard work of the team to integrate key Lexalytics text analytics and machine learning technology into our product portfolio. We are committed to delivering AI-based technology to further our ambition of helping businesses improve experiences for their employees and customers.”
Announcement #3: The Latest Updates to the Award-Winning XI Platform
We couldn’t be more excited about this InMoment announcement: the launch of the latest set of technology innovations on our market-leading XI Platform! With these additions and updates, organizations will be empowered to acquire new customers, retain and increase loyalty of existing customers, and drive improved business performance—all within one seamlessly integrated platform.
Want to know what’s new? Here’s a quick roundup:
Product Experience Cloud™: An experience ecosystem built to help product managers, developers, and UX designers understand friction points that need to be addressed while also providing perspective to customer experience teams on how product interaction impacts the larger customer experience.
Data Exploration™: The industry’s first search-based text analytics solution that explores unstructured data from any source for a single integrated view of experiences based on key themes, underlying sentiment, relative customer effort, intent and emotion so businesses can explore feedback and take action faster.
Spotlight™: An award-winning, sophisticated AI-based and natural language processing (NLP) power-user application for real-time automated insights discovery from all types of customer experience signals to improve customer and employee acquisition or customer recovery and retention.
Moments™: InMoment’s real-time mobile app, built to socialize experience feedback through a curated data feed which can be displayed on your phone or tablet, or through monitor displays in an office environment to help teams drive improvement on the go by sharing feedback, adding experiences to a collection of like comments, and closing the feedback loop to grow stronger customer relationships.
In addition, enhancements have been made to existing XI applications to better facilitate inclusion, intelligent decision making, and sophisticated data workflows, all leveraging industry-leading AI. They include:
Survey: The industry’s first WCAG 2.0 compliant feedback collection solution that uses a proprietary enhanced method, allowing businesses to efficiently integrate data workflows reducing errors and ultimately cost.
Reporting: Expert-designed industry and role-specific dashboards for the front line, CX teams, and C Level stakeholders that deliver an aggregate view of what’s happening by program, across regions, and through locations with flexible data views that unearth key business drivers.
Workflow: Automating the most time-consuming part of data analytics processing, Workflow seamlessly segments and drives automated action on your customer base within the XI Platform and triggers events in existing enterprise systems such as Slack, Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce etc.
InMoment AI: Underpinning all XI applications is industry-leading InMoment AI, an intelligence engine powering both structured and unstructured analytics across the platform. InMoment AI combines advanced Machine Learning algorithms with industry specific taxonomies, near-universal language support and encapsulated vertical knowledge to deliver rich insights, predictive analytics, and actionable recommendations through the XI application ecosystem.
Improving experiences is why InMoment exists. Our mission is to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together. These latest InMoment announcements are our next steps in realizing that mission. We can’t wait for the road ahead!
Surveys are a great way to collect information about people's perceptions, opinions, thoughts, attitudes, etc. However, the trick is making sure that you're asking your questions the right way in order to get the data that you need, as well as ensuring that the people who take your survey will all interpret your survey questions the same way. To help you get started, below are 12 qualities of good survey questions to keep in mind when writing your surveys.
Surveys are a great way to collect information about people’s perceptions, opinions, thoughts, attitudes, etc. But what makes for a good survey or good survey question?
The trick is making sure that you’re asking your questions the right way in order to get the data that you need, as well as ensuring that the people who take your survey will all interpret your survey questions the same way. To help you get started, below are 12 qualities of good survey questions to keep in mind when writing your surveys.
12 Things Good Survey Question Do…
#1: Evokes the truth. However, you should avoid sensitive questions.
#2: Asks for an answer on only one dimension. You will need to phrase the question to extract the exact information you need, and avoid the possibility of someone giving you an ambiguous response.
#3: Can accommodate all possible answers. A good practice is to allow for multiple responses. Don’t assume that you know it all.
#4: Has mutually exclusive options. (i.e. There should be only one correct or appropriate choice.)
#5: Flows well from the previous question. Your question transitions should be smooth and logical.
#6: Does not make erroneous assumptions.
#7: Does not imply a desired answer. Remember to use objectivity in your questions.
#8: Does not use emotionally loaded or vaguely defined words. Also remember not to use unfamiliar acronyms or abbreviations.
#9: Does not ask the respondent to rank more than five items in a given series.
#10: Puts personal questions at the end of the survey.
#11: Gives respondents the option to not answer the question.
#12: Uses one or two open-ended questions. This invokes direct, well thought out answers.
Types of Survey Questions
Here are some of the most common survey question types you could use:
Multiple Choice Questions
Open Ended Questions
Close Ended Questions
‘Yes’ or ‘No’ Answer Questions
Rating Scale Questions
Good Survey Questions to Ask
Depending on your subject matter, here are some examples of good survey questions to ask about a product/service or a brand/company.
What could we improve on?
On a scale of 1-10 how easy was it to use our product/service?
Would you recommend our product/service to a friend?
Why did you choose us over a competitor?
Did our product/service help you accomplish your goal?
Did we solve your problem?
How can we be more helpful?
What would you like to see from us?
How would you rate our customer service from 1-10?
Why did you choose this product/service?
Why are you canceling your service?
Where did you hear about us?
Your survey will want to give you the right data so make sure to ask the right questions and phrase it in a way that’ll achieve what you’re looking for.
Looking for More Advice on How to Craft Effective CX Surveys and Good Survey Questions?
Over our decades of experience improving customer and employee experiences with the world’s most beloved brands, our experts have collected plenty of best practices and compiled them into various resources to help you inform your efforts! Wondering how to measure survey success? We’ve got you. What about increasing your response rates? We’ve got you there, too.
Check out this list of our most game-changing survey best practices here:
Focus on Your CX Program to Improve Your Response Rates
Clients frequently ask InMoment XI Strategist Eric Smuda how they can improve their response rates, which is a significant issue in the customer feedback and market research arenas. However, he believes the obsession with them is misguided and stuck in traditional market research methodology. The quality of the feedback you are getting is much more important than how many people answered a given question or the statistical significance of that sample size. Learn more here!
When to Send a Traditional Employee or Customer Experience Survey
What questions warrant sending a survey? Our experts advise a process of elimination that helps you understand which listening tools to use and when—and they’ve laid it out step by step in this asset!
How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys
It can be tempting to send out surveys whenever you have a question, but effective surveys are part of a much larger strategy. Wondering how to craft that strategy? Our expert Andrew Park has you covered in this quick article.
How Short Should You Make Your Survey?
Most customer experience surveys are designed to be five minutes in length or shorter. However, we have seen a trend toward companies requesting even shorter customer experience surveys, often due to the impression that shorter surveys increase response rates. Their assumption is that customers are overwhelmed with surveys and therefore will only answer short ones. Is there empirical evidence to back up this perception? Find out in this white paper by expert Dave Ensing!
The Art and Science of Email Survey Invitations
We don’t know about yours, but our email inboxes are constantly flooded with requests from brands! So, how do you make your email survey invitations stand out, fetch great response rates, and collect quality data? Dave Ensing has the answers here!
Looking for more advice on how to craft good survey questions and even better surveys? Contact an InMoment sales representative today to inquire about InMoment Survey Design & Data Gathering Best Practices Consulting Services. And/or, sign up today for one or more survey training courses at InMoment University.
Investor Blake Bartlett coined the term “End User Era” to capture an important shift that is happening on an organizational level across industries: “Today, software just shows up in the workplace unannounced. End users are finding products on their own and telling their bosses which ones to buy. And it’s all happening at lightning speed.”
Companies like DocuSign, Slack, Zoom, and Hubspot are examples of SaaS companies that are thriving in the End User Era. Their success is rooted in products that end-users love. Product Led Growth codifies this end user-focused growth model. PLG relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion. This approach goes all-in on end user ease and productivity to drive growth, and is a radical shift away from the acquisition growth model so familiar in the software industry.
Customers Will Tell You Where Your Product Led Growth Bottlenecks Are
Metrics are essential to understanding progress on the product led growth curve. Typically the PLG model evaluates business and pipeline health based on user actions (clicks) and subscription revenue.
This is where CX metrics are so valuable. Voice of customer data illuminates the “why” behind the clicks and the cash. Classic CX surveys like NPS, PSAT, CSAT, and Customer Effort Score(CES) monitor customer sentiment—providing critical insight into behavioral and revenue metrics.
By analyzing the open-ended comments that accompany the rating-scale questions you can identify positive and negative themes in what customers are saying. Based on what you learn, you can confidently prioritize improvements to your product that will remove bottlenecks, the enemy of PLG success.
At the core, product led growth is about taking tasks that would traditionally be done manually and putting them into the product to create efficiency and a better customer experience. Step back and map out all of the steps in your funnel from acquiring an initial lead all the way through to turning that lead into a paying customer who sees value in the product. Where are the bottlenecks?
How do you know where your bottlenecks are, and whether you are eliminating them?
Let’s explore each metric to understand how it can help you identify and address bottlenecks, with real-world examples from our customers.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Loyalty and More
Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys ask customers to evaluate how likely they are to recommend your product or company to a friend or colleague, this “propensity to refer” is an excellent predictor of future growth.
Unlike the other metrics covered here, which are flexible and easily customizable, true NPS surveys follow a very specific format when it comes to asking the first (of two) questions. By asking that first question in a specific way, using a standard scale, companies can compare their NPS scores to industry benchmarks. The second question, which gathers qualitative data regarding improvement opportunities, can (and often should) be customized.
NPS Surveys ask two questions…
Question #1: “How likely are you to recommend this product or company to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0-10?”
Question #2: “What can we improve about this experience?” (if they rated you 0-8) or “What did you love about this experience” (if they rated you a 9 or 10).
The first question allows you to calculate your Net Promoter Score, which is a number between -100 and +100 and serves as a benchmark for progress. For detailed information on how to calculate NPS, and what the number really means, take a look at our Net Promoter Score post.
The second NPS survey question is just as important, if not more so, than the score itself because this qualitative data tells you what you need to do to improve end user experience.
Why is NPS key to Product Led Growth? Traditionally viewed as an indicator of growth (as mentioned above), NPS is also a crystal ball when it comes to retention. NPS gives you a glimpse into the minds and hearts of your end users. It can provide a constant stream of feedback about bottlenecks and that will help you create products that enable the ease and productivity you are going for.
In short, NPS captures what’s most important to users, whether it’s documentation, training, or aspects of the product itself. NPS is typically the foundation of any CX program, and since you don’t want to get overwhelmed in the beginning, there’s nothing wrong with making NPS your sole CX metric at this stage.
NPS Example: DocuSign
DocuSign uses NPS to gather feedback on product features and pinpoint any bottlenecks in the experience. They achieve this by customizing their NPS follow-up question (the one that asks users to explain their score). In the in-app survey pictured below, Docusign asks “Tell us about your experience sending an envelope.”
Guneet Singh, Director of CX at DocuSign, believes that regardless of which metric you use, it’s vital to understand how customers feel about your product at key points in their journey. In other words, don’t wait to conduct an annual survey—gather continuous data and refine your product based on that feedback.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Because Support Is a Bottleneck
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), like NPS, is another metric you can use at various points in the customer journey. The classic use case for CSAT is following up on a support interaction, where you can ask customers about their experience:
Solving their specific problem
Working with a particular CS agent
Working with your company in general
CSAT surveys can use a scale ranging from “very satisfied” or “very dissatisfied,” often followed by a question that asks the user to share the reason behind their score.
What makes this touchpoint so vital from a PLG perspective? Support calls, by definition, are a point of friction—nobody contacts customer support when things are going right.
Product Led Growth endeavors to eliminate support interactions altogether. When was the last time you reached out to customer support at Slack or DocuSign? Chances are, it’s never happened. That’s the seamlessness you’re going for.
This touchpoint is a rich source of insight into frustrations that customers face. Product teams that prioritize end user experience pay close attention to feedback from support as they improve product and design new features.
CSAT Example: Glassdoor Glassdoor, the popular site for job listings and anonymous employer reviews, uses Customer Satisfaction surveys to gather feedback on support interactions. When a support case is closed in Salesforce, end users receive a personalized CSAT survey via email.
Carmen Woo, Salesforce Solution Architect and Senior Application Engineer, holds the cross-functional CX technology vision at Glassdoor. “What is intriguing about our use case is that we use machine learning to analyze feedback. Comments are tagged by topic themes and are assigned sentiment to capture the emotion behind the user’s words.
“The [InMoment] platform allows our Support team to segment feedback by agent and other relevant business drivers to uncover insights that contribute to optimizing our support function, and it can also reveal bottlenecks that are best addressed by improving product features or design,” says Carmen.
Product Satisfaction (PSAT): Adoption and Engagement Bottlenecks
PSAT surveys are highly flexible, and they can be structured the same way you structure Customer Satisfaction survey questions—asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction with a product using a scale from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied” (e.g., 1-3 or 1-5) or through a binary response (e.g., “happy face” or “sad face”).
PSAT surveys are best delivered within an app, when customers are using your product and can give you fresh, timely feedback. The customer sentiment derived from PSAT surveys is the necessary complement to behavioral metrics. Sure, you can see in the clicks that users are not adopting a feature, but why? PSAT helps to answer that question and guides optimization efforts.
PSAT Example: HubSpot
Marketers that use HubSpot, the popular CRM software, may recall responding to a Product Satisfaction survey when using a new feature for the first time. PSAT gives Hubspot immediate feedback on whether a new feature is delivering value to the end-user.
Even if you’ve done extensive user testing, getting feedback on a feature within the context of a user’s experience of the whole product is valuable. Is there friction? Should the feature be tweaked in some way?
This approach, which is a key aspect of lean UX design, ensures you don’t go too far down the rabbit hole with a product feature that sounded great in theory but didn’t serve your end-users in the real world. New features can bring complexity — the bain of end user ease. By continually asking for feedback in-product, you can better calibrate that balance and maintain a frictionless, easeful end-user experience.
Example InMoment PSAT survey in a mobile app.
Customer Effort Score (CES): Identify Bottlenecks in Onboarding
A seamless onboarding experience is key to widespread adoption. If end-users have to work too hard to get up and running, they’ll give up and try a competitor’s product. Even if you have an enthusiastic champion within a company, if they have to prod others to adopt or spend time convincing them of your value, their own enthusiasm will wane. As such, it’s important to evaluate how much effort end users must put into getting started.
Customer Effort Score (CES) asks how difficult it was to accomplish a given task using a predefined scale (e.g., 1-7 or 1-5). Here is an example of a CES survey:
CES surveys are frequently used to follow up on support calls, but they’re also extremely valuable when evaluating the onboarding experience. Success teams know that the seeds of churn can be sown in the onboarding phase. They have been using feedback from CES surveys to both (1) follow up with that customer to fix the problem and (2) develop tasks and processes that will prevent future customers from experiencing the same bottlenecks.
However, in the context of PLG, addressing onboarding feedback isn’t just the domain of the Success or Support team. It is vital input to UX teams that seek to eliminate tasks that would traditionally be done manually and put them into the product to create efficiency and a better customer experience.
CES Example: Watermark
Watermark is in the EdTech space, and they’ve taken a comprehensive approach to optimizing user experience. Here’s how they do it, starting with Customer Effort Score surveys.
Watermark has a complex onboarding and training process, so they gather data at the end of each of three phases of training using CES surveys. The feedback goes to the implementation and training teams to both (1) improve the process and (2) identify customers who may need extra support. Then, of course, they look for larger trends and modify their onboarding experience accordingly.
Watermark also measures NPS & CSAT. NPS is measured across six product lines, and Watermark studies the correlation between NPS and renewals. Higher NPS scores predict a greater likelihood for renewal, and improving products based on NPS survey results is key to Watermark’s customer retention strategy. CSAT surveys, triggered from Salesforce Service Cloud when a case is closed, help to evaluate and improve Customer Support.
And as Dave Hansen, the CX champion at Watermark, points out, they dig into the data to identify points of friction. “The feedback we’re getting tells us that there isn’t necessarily an issue with our overall solutions,” says Dave. “You may have issues running a certain report, or you may have issues with the way you have to click through to something.”
Product Led Growth Strategy Is About End User Experience
The four CX metrics covered in this post (NPS, CSAT, PSAT, and CES) offer insight into end user experience and augment behavioral data with the voice of your customer.
Remember, don’t allow scores to be your sole focus. There is gold in the open-ended feedback you receive. Without analyzing the open-ended feedback you receive, the metrics are just benchmarks that you’ll aimlessly try to identify bottlenecks through guesswork. In the end, that won’t get you very far.
Product Led Growth is all about creating a smoother experience in the moments that matter. CX metrics and voice of the customer comments help technology companies do just that.
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I’ve seen organizations use transactional surveys to learn everything about their customers’ short-term brand experience, including ease-of-purchase and how quickly that package actually arrived. Customers keep a company going—it literally pays to listen to them.
Surveys are one of the most direct and effective means of gathering insights. They provide what many customers crave most: an easy-to-access platform they can use to voice their thoughts and opinions about a brand.
To make this process as efficient as possible (and to make it simpler for companies to source different kinds of feedback), several types of surveys have emerged over the years that make it easy to focus on customers’ opinions about transactions, brand relationships, and the like. I’ve found one such questionnaire, the transactional survey, to be an invaluable tool for assessing almost any customer touchpoint. Let’s briefly discuss how it works.
What Are Transactional Surveys? How Are They Used?
Transactional surveys can be used to gauge many touchpoints, but the one they’re typically associated with (and the one they’re named for) is a key part of the brand experience: the sale. In my experience, transactional surveys are an ideal way to gauge customers’ immediate feelings about a purchase because they can be used to solicit feedback quickly. Below is an example of a post-transaction survey in action:
A Post-Transaction Survey in Retail
I’ve seen organizations use this tool to learn everything about their customers’ short-term brand experience, including ease-of-purchase and how quickly that package actually arrived. Customers keep a company going—it literally pays to listen to them.
Using Transactional Surveys in the Call Center
Transactional surveys are a great way for customers to gauge purchases, but their utility extends far beyond the point of sale. I’ve also seen them be useful for evaluating call center experiences.
Poor call center interactions can quickly land an organization in a sea of bad reviews, but transactional surveys can provide an opportunity to ensure smooth operations, source invaluable feedback, and demonstrate that a company cares about their customer experience. Because surveys can be used to gather all of these insights quickly, I’ve found them to be a valuable tool for streamlining both customer experiences and feedback.
Using Transactional Surveys Online
Whether a customer is browsing an about page or trying to file a product claim, transactional surveys can easily be incorporated into website feedback tools. Companies can implement just about any question at just about any website touchpoint, making it simple to quickly collect feedback about website language, page click orders, and a host of other user experience elements.
This type of feedback is where transactional surveys’ ability to deliver feedback in real time is especially helpful. Companies can be made aware of website flaws or customer complaints just after they occur, enabling product teams to correct mistakes and respond to feedback faster.
Survey Symbiosis: Leveraging Transactional Surveys in Your Feedback Strategy
There’s no better means of capturing immediate feedback about a short-term brand experience than with transactional surveys. Their speed, size, and ease of use make them an invaluable way to connect customers and organizations.
I also believe, though, that while transactional surveys provide plenty of valuable information on their own, there are other types of surveys that can deliver insights that are just as valuable for other purposes. Companies that blend multiple types of surveys into a single feedback strategy can gain a much richer portrait of their audience.
Regardless of how many kinds of surveys an organization uses, though, they’re all only as relevant as the action that companies take with them. Proactivity and a willingness to act on feedback are the keys to whether a survey strategy is ultimately successful. That’s no less true for transactional surveys than for any other insight-gathering tool.
