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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!

In this Post

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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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

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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.

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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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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Updated May 27, 2025

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!

How Quick Service Restaurants Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Every Department

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!

In this Post

How Five Different Departments Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Food Services Brands Everyone Owns the Customer Experience—And Everyone Can Benefit

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Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 5 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How a Global Grocer Turns CX Feedback Into Realized Customer Spend Targets

The Context

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
+€35m* Opportunity in as Little as Six Months

In this Post

The Context The Opportunity The Impact What's Next Summary

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Updated October 14, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 2 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

5 Ways to Leverage Net Promoter Score to Boost Customer Retention

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).

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What Is a Good Net Promoter Score?

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.

Reaching out to Net Promoter Score detractors to boost customer retention

#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

In this Post

What Is Net Promoter Score?What Do These Categories Mean?What Is a Good Net Promoter Score?5 Ways to Use NPS to Boost Customer Retention Keep Going

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 9 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The Best Way to Identify (and Share) the Moments that Matter with Frontline Employees

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!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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Written by Jim Katzman

Reading time 3 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How Quick Service Restaurant Brands Can Drive Profitable Guest Experience Programs

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.

In this Post

3 Steps to a Future-Proof, Revenue-Driving Guest Experience Program for Quick Service Restaurants Guest Experience Is the Differentiator for Quick Service Restaurants

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

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

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

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Seamless

End-to-End

Consistent

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Snowball Sampling

The Bottom Line

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The Rundown on Employee Experience

Trajectory Takeoff

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Personalization and Relevance

Optimized Marketing Strategies

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CX Benefit #2: Understand How You Measure Up

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Top Articles on EX, Linking EX & CX, and Branded Experience

#1: The Future Role of Consumer Trust

#2: Trust as an Emotion

#3: The Customer Behavior Consequences of Low and High Employee Trust

#4: What if Employees Don’t Support Brand and CX Initiatives?

#5: The Positive and Negative Emotions of Employees and Customers

#6: Emotional Drivers Shared by Employees and Customers

#7: The Importance of Brand Image in Shaping Perceived Value and CX

#8: Creating Emotional Value for Customers and Employees

#9: Customer Bonding and the Branded Experience

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