You’ve heard it time and time again: employees are your greatest asset for business success. 

We all know it’s true, but only a few experts can articulate (and prove) how the employee experience directly impacts the bottom line. And perhaps that’s why so many brands stick to the customer experience and fail to include employees in their efforts. The thing is, however, that the customer experience and the employee experience overlap in so many ways.

In the first episode InMoment’s “XI Expert Take” video series, VP of Global Employee Experience Stacy Bolger dives into that overlap and explains how businesses can leverage their employee experience for organization-wide success. Here are a couple of takeaways we want to highlight for you:

Lack of EX Investment Equals Significant Revenue Drainage

As a part of her role at InMoment, Stacy Bolger often visits brands to brainstorm solutions to their greatest EX challenges. Despite the fact that these brands span across industries and the globe, Bolger has found that she often sees the same phenomenon unfold: brands that don’t have a strategy in place to survey their employees lose money.

In her “XI Expert Take” episode, she uses the example of a call center to bring this point to life. In her story, call center agents regularly take the same call about a process inefficiency that causes customers frustration.

“Let’s say that [in that call center] 150 representatives take a call [for the same issue] twenty times per week. That comes out to three thousand times per week. At eight dollars per call, that now has translated to $24,000 a week on the same call. And when we annualize it? That comes to $1.2 million a year that we are spending on a single call type and a process that a frontline employee has the insight to fix, knows the solution to, and yet that brand simply does not have the process with which to gather that feedback.”

That’s right. If the brand in Stacy’s example simply surveyed its employees asking for insights about the customer experience, it could save over a million dollars! And though this situation is hypothetical, the same kind of revenue drain is all too real for brands that fail to invest in the employee experience and examine the voice of employee (VoE).

Failure to Listen to Employees Leads to Lower Engagement

Voice of employee initiatives definitely excel at removing customer-unfriendly processes, but they also are absolutely vital to keeping employee morale up and churn down. Why? Because employees who feel listened to feel valued, are more engaged, and are likely to stick around a lot longer.

Put yourself in your employees’ shoes. If you kept bringing up a recurring process or operations issue to your manager, but nothing was being done to fix that issue on a large scale, how would you feel? You’d feel small, you’d feel ignored, and you’d feel as if all the work you put in day after day amounts to nothing in the eyes of your employer. If you felt that way, would you stick around?

It’s safe to say that no one would enjoy that situation. And when unsatisfied employees leave, your organization loses tenured, passionate employees and a significant amount of money. In fact, turnover can cost a company about 33% of

an employee’s annual salary. How? Because when an employee leaves, the business has to take on multiple costs, including the cost to recruit and the cost to train! 

Putting a voice of employee program into place prevents this drainage. It creates a strategy with which brands can survey their employees about the customer experience. And when you combine strategic listening with advanced analytics that unearth trends in that data, you can alert the right teams within the company to take action and make change. 

When the employee sees a process they’ve flagged as an issue transformed into something more customer friendly, they feel like an imperative part of the organization (which, in truth, they are).

Tying Business Value Back to Employee Initiatives

In the rest of her episode, Stacy highlights other areas where employee initiatives excel, does some quick math to quantify the results, and tells you the steps you should take to get the ball rolling. 

But don’t take our word for it. You can watch the full twenty minute session for free here!

I recently put together a Point of View article about the importance of cost reduction, and how going about it a certain way enables brands to reduce costs, lower friction, and build better relationships by improving customer experiences. These are goals that brands can accomplish with a single motion, and the organizations that say otherwise are not, unfortunately, utilizing their experience platforms and data as much as they could be.

As important as cost reduction is, however, it’s one piece of a larger picture that brands should draw inspiration from as they try building better experiences. That picture is what I call the four economic pillars, and we’ll briefly run through them now.

Four Economic Pillars for Your Experience Improvement Strategy

  1. Customer Acquisition
  2. Customer Retention
  3. Cross-Sell/Upsell
  4. Cost Reduction

Pillar #1: Customer Acquisition

Brands should always try to acquire new customers as a matter of course, but a lot of organizations don’t tune their experience platforms & programs to that objective as much as they can and should. A versatile Experience Improvement (XI) program can help brands identify where prospective customers live in the feedback universe, then digest their sentiments to create an experience and product offering that those individuals will find attractive. One reason why more brands don’t succeed here is because they don’t decide where it might be best to look for new audiences before turning their programs on. Be sure to discuss and agree on your program design  before proceeding!

Pillar #2: Customer Retention

We can all agree that it is more efficient for brands to retain current customers than to rely too much on new ones for revenue. That’s why you should use your experience programs and feedback tools to not only seek out new customers, but also ensure you’re keeping tabs on conversations within your existing customer base. The best way to do this is to bring all relevant teams to the table, construct a profile of your existing customer against a backdrop of operational and financial data, then use that info to continuously refine your products and services, as well as reduce friction in the experience you deliver. Customers appreciate a brand that does more than react to problems as they arise.

Pillar #3: Cross-Sell/Upsell

Creating a profile of your existing customers is useful for more than ‘just’ building a better experience for them; it also reveals new opportunities to cross-sell and upsell that group of clientele. Seeking out new sources of revenue is all well and good, but most brands would probably be surprised at what opportunities are just waiting in their own backyards. For that reason, organizations should build a customer profile with both better experiences and cross-selling opportunities in mind. Try to resist the urge to consider this pure sales; rather look at it as helping your customers get the most value from all that you have to offer. 

Pillar #4: Cost Reduction

Cost reduction is very important on its own, but it takes on added meaning when viewed through the lens of these other three pillars. What makes cost reduction exciting  is that brands can achieve cost reduction goals via a lot of the same processes that underlie these other pillars; reducing friction, streamlining processes like customer claims, and the like. Again, brands should not view cost reduction as something that’s mutually exclusive with a better experience. Rather, with the right experience platform, organizations can achieve both goals with one approach.

Click here to read my full Point of View on cost reduction, in which I take a much deeper dive on this subject, and stay tuned for additional material we’ve got coming down the pike on the importance of this and other economic pillars!

While so many companies are pondering how to grow their customer experience (CX) programs, there are plenty of CX champions looking to start a CX program. We talk with plenty of companies that are just starting up, or as we prefer to call it: Early Stage. 

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not at all hard to get your Early Stage CX program started. With a little guidance, you can quickly build and implement a quality program that helps you:

  • Listen to your customers.
  • Learn from your data.
  • Act to optimize the customer experience.

As your business grows, you can expand your CX program with it. For now, however, you’re primed for the Early Stage option. So listen up; we’re going to get you started!

CX program fundamentals

CX programs center on Voice of the Customer (VoC) data — your customers’ feedback about their experiences and expectations for your products or services. 

The key to a successful program lies in how you gather that feedback, how you process and learn from it, and then act on it. 

This 3-step CX model is easy to understand, simple to get started and offers quick time to value.

Listen Learn Act model for first CX program

Step 1: Listen

Listening starts with strategic thought: 

  1. CX metric. What are you trying to learn?
  2. Survey process. How will you learn it? 

Start by defining the goal of your CX program. Maybe your priority is to optimize your software product or to improve the support experience. Knowing what you want to learn will inform your listening strategy. 

Have your goal set? Onward!

Begin With Net Promoter Score (NPS)

It’s time to ask your customers some essential questions. We’ve bid good riddance to long, multi-question surveys. Because they’re tedious, their completion rates are dismal. 

To get customers to give you actionable feedback, you’ll want to use micro surveys. These single-question surveys: 

  1. Give you a score (aka metrics!) on customer loyalty or satisfaction.
  2. Give you deep insight by inviting the customer to explain their score in their own words. 

Because micro surveys are short, sweet, and to the point, more customers will answer them, meaning your response rates will soar.

There are three core CX surveys you should have in your toolbox: 

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
  3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) 

For your first customer survey, we recommend you begin with NPS. Net Promoter Score is the gold standard for measuring customer loyalty and will give you immediate insight into your customers’ stories.

Once you and your CX program have grown, you’ll likely need other survey types. But Early Stage programs can find out what they need to know with these three.

Choose Your First Survey Channel 

Alright, your question is at the ready. Now you need to decide how you will survey your customers. Each segment of your customer base probably has a preferred method of communication. Common options include: 

  • email surveys
  • in-app surveys inside a web or mobile product
  • SMS

If you’re unsure where to start, ask yourself this: Where here are our most important customers interacting with us?

If you’re still not sure, dive into this article about how to choose the best channel for customer feedback survey. Here are some general trends we see with our customers:

  • SaaS business or mobile app: in-product survey
  • E-commerce business: transactional approach like sending an email survey a few days after delivery
  • Airline or utility (or other business already using texts or phone calls to communicate on customer mobile devices): SMS

Next comes the question of when to survey. Keep it simple. Ask NPS 30 days after a customer onboards, or whenever they will have had enough time to form an opinion about the experience you offer. The surveys are something you can “set and forget” and then just let the feedback roll in. A CX platform will survey a few users every day, so you have constant feedback coming in. Some platforms (like Wootric) offer a free plan for early stage businesses. 

Step 2: Learn

Here’s where things get exciting because your customer feedback is coming in!

The great thing about Early Stage is you can read and respond to every survey response. This will help you stay closer to the customer and develop a holistic view of your customer experience.

There are an art and a science to the Learn step that will allow you to take hundreds of pieces of feedback and make it actionable. To do that, you need to get busy.

Segment Your CX Data 

Even if your company provides only one service or product, your customers are not all the same. Categories of users have different needs and are bound to experience your company in slightly different ways. 

You’ve given the same NPS survey to all your customers. Your overall NPS score will let you know how you’re doing across every customer. However, your customers aren’t just one block of users. Our marketplace customers like GrubHub and Deliveroo have both consumers and restaurant owners using their app, and those two groups have different needs. By segmenting NPS, you’ll receive more actionable insights to optimize your product for the various user groups. 

Take our customer Homebase. They have two user groups for their SaaS product that streamlines employee scheduling: those who create schedules and those who receive schedules. Per CEO John Waldmann, “NPS has allowed us to segment out the feedback and look at how happy restaurant managers are with the product after the recent changes versus how happy the wait staff is. Are we skewing too heavily toward one side or the other? Do we need to spend some more product cycles to improve the employee experience?”

You can take a constant pulse of your CX program by reviewing the performance of your overall business and customer segment NPS scores over time. Tracking and metricizing customer sentiment over time is very helpful when you’re looking to make improvements. The bonus is you never miss a trend.

Identify Themes in Customer Comments 

While it’s interesting to read and respond to individual feedback, at some point, you will get more qualitative feedback than you can easily digest. Lots of feedback is a good thing — it means you’re growing!

Now’s the time to filter your text responses to understand the “why” behind the numerical scores. You’ll filter these responses for specific topics by using tags. Tags are associated with particular keywords you want to monitor, and they allow you to easily track the Share of Voice (SoV) of a topic. How much are people talking about price, performance, delivery, or a new feature? 

Setting up this categorization does a lot of things:

  • It helps you follow long-term trends.
  • It gives you insight into a topic’s trajectory.
  • It lets you know if you’re addressing your customer’s concerns effectively — or you still need to do more.

Step 3: Act

You’ve listened, you’ve learned, and now it’s time to make a difference by acting externally and internally!

Close the loop with customers

Every piece of feedback is valuable. While you’re hoping for promoters telling you what a great job you’re doing, it’s the detractors who care enough to let you know what needs improvement that can help you make the most significant business gains through your CX program. 

Close the loop, especially with detractors! 

Reach out via email or phone and address their concerns promptly. Passing your CX data to the system, you use to communicate with customers — like Intercom or Hubspot — can make this easy. Customers will appreciate that you took the time to listen and respond. You may even turn a detractor into a happy customer. 

Activate your brand promoters. When someone gives you praise in a survey response, ask them to write a review or give you a quote. These testimonials can be great ways to distinguish your brand from the competition. 

If you don’t have the resources to respond individually, write a blog post that summarizes what you’ve heard and the actions you’re taking and share it with your customers. 

Loop closing in practice

You may be thinking, “this sounds great in theory, but that’s a lot to expect from a new program.” Understood. Many people in the Early Stage of CX programs are also in their company’s early stage, with too much work and too few people. Our customer Albacross, a lead-gen software startup, automated closing the loop with its customers, which achieved program goals without taxing their resources.

Here’s what they do based on the individual NPS score:

Detractors (who rate their app low with a 0-6): They send two messages via Intercom asking for additional feedback. The goal here is to start a conversation and better understand why the customer is frustrated.

  • They send an email:

Albacross-Emails-for-CX

  • They send an in-app message that appears immediately after the user completes the survey:

in-app post-survey message from Albacore

Passives (who rate 7-8) receive an in-app email of gratitude, letting them know they appreciate the feedback.

In-app post-survey message from Albacore for passive NPS

Promoters (who rate 9-10) receive an email from the CEO offering gratitude and asking them to please review the company on a 3rd party review site:

In-app post-survey message for promoters

Evangelize CX data

You are trying to build a customer-first culture at your company. To do that, you need to communicate, communicate, communicate. 

Make sure everyone has easy access to CX information! From Customer Success and Customer Support to Product to Marketing and beyond, every person in your company has a part in creating your customer experience. Create a CX Slack channel and encourage the entire company to join. Put up wall-mounted dashboards that put CX metrics front and center with the newest feedback and the latest scores — report it right next to other critical business metrics at the next company-wide meeting. 

A single survey on a single channel offers significant customer insights. Like any new program, you want to start simply, optimize, and then expand. Once you have mastered the Early Stage program, it’s easy to move on to the Growth Stage and Expert Stage. 

Reducing customer friction is extremely important to any brand. However, going about friction reduction in the right way can do more than lower costs for an organization; it can also build a fundamentally improved experience for your customers. Today’s conversation briefly covers how brands can strike this balance with a single approach.

Creating Friction-Free Journeys

Ostensibly, reducing cost is supposed to do just that. However, what a lot of organizations don’t realize is that reducing costs can also reduce friction along the customer journey—that excess effort that customers have to put in just to interact with your brand. Things like repeat phone calls, having to go back to the store, and the like all fall under that category.

Friction creates higher customer dissatisfaction, steeper costs, and, in a worst-case scenario, customer churn.  Fortunately for organizations, this dynamic also works in reverse, which is why it’s all the more important for organizations to leverage their experience programs as much as possible to address customer friction points. Continue gathering feedback, but make sure to analyze its sentiments, share that information with the wider organization, and work with all the relevant teams to come up with solutions and program enhancements. Even fixes like taking a few seconds off of contact center calls, for example, can save brands a lot of money while also increasing customer satisfaction.

The Ties That Bind

There’s a bigger picture to reducing costs than making individual transactions easier for customers: their overall relationship with your brand. Remember that, while evaluating singular interactions is certainly important, most customers don’t think about your company in those terms. Generally, customers think about their entire relationship with your brand from beginning until now, which is why going about cost reduction with friction elimination in mind is so fundamentally important.

When customers feel like all their interactions with your brand are frictionless, you create a more human connection and a more loyal customer relationship. Cost reduction isn’t just about saving money; it’s about refining your customer experience into something that keeps customers coming back for more because they know you care about them as people.

So, how else might brands use cost reduction to create a more human experience while also strengthening their bottom line? Click here to read my full-length point of view on this subject and to learn more about how cost reduction can create Experience Improvement (XI) when it’s done meaningfully.

Brands work hard to keep their customers happy and to create positive experiences, but the reality is that no organization can prevent every negative experience that might come a customer’s way. Whether it’s due to unforeseen circumstances or plain old human error, negative experiences are always a specter that brands need to watch out for.

Perhaps more importantly, organizations need to be prepared to recover at-risk customers when those experiences, for whatever reason, do occur. At the end of the day, a brand’s obligation to these customers goes beyond the bottom line—it’s part of creating a grander, positive, human experience that will not only salvage the relationship but also keep that customer coming back for more. Let’s dive in.

Before Problems Become Problems

The first step to an effective recovery strategy is to be as vigilant for negative experiences as possible. Proactive multichannel listening is key here—brands need to constantly meet customers where they talk about their brand interactions, then analyze their sentiments to make sure they’re not missing anything. Post-transactions surveys can be helpful here, but brands also need to pay attention to social media, phone calls, and every other medium their customers use to express how they feel about their experiences.

This strategy is effective for more than just one-time problems, too. The right experience platform can digest entire spectra of customer feedback, which helps brands spot recurring issues that they may not have even known about. Thus, companies can use this strategy to both save at-risk customers and fix deep-rooted problems that might be plaguing their wider goals and aspirations.

Closing The Loop

Paying close attention to customer conversations is important, but what happens when problems slip through that crack and put their relationship with your brand at risk? When that occurs, organizations must be prepared to close the loop with customers. In this context, closing the loop refers to assigning an employee to the customer, having that employee intently listen to the customer’s story, and rectifying the problem well enough to salvage that relationship.

While closing the loop seems pretty straightforward at the outset, there’s much more to this process than ‘just’ effective customer service. Closing the loop doesn’t end when a satisfied customer hangs up the phone—meaningfully rectifying that problem means reviewing how it occurred with the wider organization, creating a solution, and implementing it so that future customers don’t suffer the same issue. Looking at it this way means that the organization is actually closing two loops: the one with the customer (inner loop) and creating a more customer experience (CX)-driven culture (outer loop). Both are vital to customer recovery.

Making Things Right

There’s a common element to both of these strategies and to customer recovery in general, and it’s empowering your employees to do the right thing. Challenging employees to step up, involving them in the recovery process, and democratizing data to help them see the big picture are all great ways to ensure that your recovery strategy is working. There’s no better person to salvage an at-risk relationship than an impassioned employee, and no better way to instill passion in your teams than giving them the tools (and encouragement) they need to rise to the occasion.

By challenging employees to be proactive, paying attention to customers’ constant conversations, and by closing the loop when problems do arise, brands can ensure they’re doing everything they can to rescue at-risk customers. This approach allows them to create fundamentally improved experiences that both strengthen the bottom line and turn recovery situations into meaningful human interactions.

Want to learn more about how you can boost your customer retention through recovery methods and more? Read our full eBook on the subject, “How to Improve Customer Retention & Generate Revenue with Your CX Program” today!

For decades, brands have used metrics that gauge how easy (or difficult) a time customers have interacting with them, as well as how much effort it takes for customers to complete such transactions. At a glance, metrics that measure ease, effort, customer satisfaction, and the like can be very helpful for both alerting organizations to certain problems and giving them a surface-level idea of what those issues are. This makes them hand canaries in the coal mine.

While these metrics certainly have their uses, it’s much more difficult for brands to use them to find the deeper meaning behind problems. That is, unless they take part in a few brief exercises. Keep reading for the rundown on the exercises we suggest you apply to your own ease and effort scores.

Three Exercises to Help You Find the Meaning Behind Customer Ease & Effort Scores

  1. Driver Modelling
  2. Transaction Subgroups
  3. Customer Subgroups

Exercise #1: Driver Modelling

One of the best ways for brands to glean the meaning behind their metrics is to set them as the outcome measure of driver modelling. This technique enables organizations to not only better understand key parts of the customer experience, but also customers’ perceptions of those components. Driver modelling also lets organizations know whether they’ve used enough such metrics to adequately explain how effort is being impacted.

Exercise #2: Transaction Subgroups

Every interaction with your organization brings with it its unique amount of customer effort. Because of this, it’s handy to divide your transactions into groups depending on how much effort customers perceive they entail. Thus, diving deeper and analyzing transactions in this manner can help brands pinpoint friction or pain points, then create solutions to deal with them.

Exercise #3: Customer Subgroups

Your brand has a variety of different interactions—your customer base is even more diverse. Rather than study this base as a whole, brands can and should profile subgroups who, say, tend to report dissatisfaction more often than usual. Some groups of customers will, unfortunately, have a harder time interacting with your brand than the rest, and though the possible reasons behind that vary wildly from industry to industry, profiling subgroups like this can help brands further identify CX pain points and, more importantly, fix them in a way that those customers find meaningful.

Meaning Over Metrics

Like we said before, metrics have their uses and are helpful for letting brands know that customer satisfaction, ease, effort, etc are shifting in one direction or the other.

Applying these techniques to your metrics can make them much more powerful, giving your organization the context and the details it needs to meaningfully transform your customer experience. Your customers will thank you for it and feel much more valued, creating a human connection that transcends market forces and that builds a better bottom line for your brand.

Want to learn more about effort and ease and their purpose in customer experience? Check out our free white paper on the subject here!

As customer experiences grow more complex, so too have customer expectations. This has become especially true in recent years, as customers take an increasingly multichannel approach to interacting with brands, purchasing products, and relaying concerns. For this and other reasons, there’s never been a greater need for brands to meet this multichannel expectation and desilo journeys than right now. Let’s get into how and why organizations should accomplish this.

A Broader View

One of the most pressing reasons to desilo customer journeys is to achieve an omnichannel view of customers. Brands can do this by integrating call center transcripts, web data, and operational metrics from across multichannel journeys (with the help of a proper experience platform). Feeding this data, this context, back into the organization helps your brand create a meaningfully improved experience for your customers.

Additionally, though creating a better customer experience is the primary goal here,, brands will find that they can also accomplish key business objectives with this more holistic view of their customers. These include greater customer acquisition, better customer retention, heightened cross-selling to your existing customer base, and lowering cost to serve, all of which result in a stronger bottom line.

A Smarter Approach

Another reason brands should desilo customer journeys is because doing so makes your Voice of the Customer (VoC) and other feedback tools smarter. As experiences have grown more multichannel, customers have grown to expect brands to remember them, their preferences, and whether certain interactions have occurred already. Desiloing journeys allows brands to achieve all of this while also removing irrelevant questions and making feedback collection more conversational.

This idea only makes sense when you consider that each piece of a VoC program is a chance to learn something new or different about a customer. The more disparate pieces of info you can collect and assemble, the more complete the picture of your customers becomes. A multichannel approach to VoC can thus help brands round out that aforementioned omnichannel customer view that’s so important to experience improvement.

The Road to Success

While customers should be the primary beneficiary of journey desiloing, employees benefit from this approach as well. The biggest benefit that employees can reap from desiloed journeys and data is having a complete set of information on customers’ interactions and expectations. When employees have that knowledge and the ability to act on it, they can take pride in having delivered a better customer experience, which boosts their morale. It also helps them understand how their work fits into the customer journey and how it connects with that of other teams.

To sum up, desiloing journeys allows brands to get a 360-degree view of customers that’s essential for improving experiences, create a multichannel experience that treats customers more like people than support tickets, and gives employees a chance to work toward the same commonly understood customer experience goal. This results in both a fundamentally connective experience for customers and transformational success for the brands that can provide it.

Click here to learn more about desiloing customer journeys (and to see an example of that process in action) in my Point of View on this subject.

Text analytics, also called text mining, has countless applications. Businesses are taking advantage of text analytics to update their service offerings, improve compliance, get ahead of PR disasters, and more.

Here are 5 examples of the industries taking advantage of text analytics in 2021.

1. Hospitality

Hotels live and die by their reviews. Reviews are not only crucial to whether someone books a stay, but they also give valuable insight into what a business is doing well – or not. And while the hospitality industry has been decimated over the COVID-19 pandemic, the quickening vaccine deployment holds great promise for 2021 and beyond for the industry. Hotels use text analytics to get a deep understanding of where they excel and where they can improve, as well as what others are doing. Say some reviews mention poor wi-fi. A hotel can analyze these reviews deeper to nail down whether the wi-fi problem is a hotel-wide approach or just in some rooms. Once they’ve figured it out, they can make the fix, thank the reviewer for their feedback, and be on their way to improved reviews in the future.

2. Financial Services

The financial services sector is hugely complex. There’s an enormous amount of interaction, documentation, risk analysis, and compliance involved. Financial services firms are using text analytics to analyze customer feedback, evaluate customer interactions, assess claims, and to identify compliance risks. Take compliance. Staff can use an NLP-based text analytics solution to quickly and easily search internal legal documents for phrases relating to finance or fraud. This can save an enormous amount of time compared with doing so manually.

3. Medical Affairs and Pharma

Medical affairs specialists help move pharmaceutical products from R&D to commercialization. This involves an encyclopedic knowledge of drug body and government regulations, as well as drug compendia. Medical affairs specialists are using text analytics to parse each of these and automatically report back on changes. The specialists can then course correct depending on what these changes mean for the drug they’re developing. Using text analytics rather than human effort reduces the time spent on tracking these changes, and is more accurate and far-reaching as well. Download AI for Medical Affairs Whitepaper

4. PR and Advertising

Text analytics is brilliant at sentiment analysis – something that PR is all about monitoring. Text analytics can run in real-time to track the sentiment in mentions about a particular company, alerting them to potential brand reputation emergencies. In advertising, text analytics can help monitor the reach of a campaign and how it’s being received. For example, a leading provider of Media Monitoring and Social Influencing used Lexalytics’, an InMoment company, API to create custom dashboards to analyze its customers’ media relations programs in terms of sentiment, engagement, perception, and performance.

5. Retail

In retail, the customer is always right. E-eCommerce retailers in particular need to make sure that the customer experience is as positive as possible, and with the boon in online buying during the pandemic, this is more important than ever. A poor experience means a customer is unlikely to return – even more so than in physical stores that people frequent due to their proximity. Many e-tailers are turning to text analytics to curate, collate and analyze feedback that helps identify points of friction when using an ecommerce website or dealing with customer support.

Would you like to know how text analytics can help your business or industry? Get in touch

Two young beautiful women in an outdoor cafe with shopping bags and cup of coffee.

The experience world has seen a certain term crop up more and more in recent years: omnichannel. This word has gradually become a regular part of customer experience (CX) practitioners’ vocabulary, and indicates a grander shift in CX thinking from focusing on transactions to creating a more seamless journey for customers. This article will briefly introduce what customers have come to expect of brands, and how those organizations can begin to think about meeting that expectation.

The Sum of All Parts

The main reason why many CX practitioners have shifted their customer experience thinking from individual transactions to entire relationships is because, well, that’s how customers see things. Individual transactions and interactions are important, yes, but customers think about a brand relationship in its entirety. This trend has only become more prominent in recent years, and it’s key to designing a meaningfully improved experience.

One of the most important reasons why customers think this way, especially when it comes to expecting a seamless experience, is because they now interact with brands in many different ways: via an app, over the phone, in-person, on a website, etc. With this increase in touchpoints has come a customer expectation that brands will recognize and remember them no matter how they choose to transact. This expectation is at the core of creating a truly omnichannel experience.

The Problem with Legacy Systems

It’s reasonable to ask why more brands haven’t immediately created omnichannel experiences if customers have come to not just desire them, but expect them. Unfortunately, many organizations have legacy systems in place that rigidly silo experience data. Call center data stays with call center teams, website data stays with digital teams, so on and so forth. This setup makes it much more difficult for brands to even know where to start desiloing customer journeys, let alone to successfully execute that goal.

Another issue to consider here is how brands use CRM systems. Though many of these databases’ data isn’t all that divided, it’s common for too few people to have access to it. This reduces data democratization, which makes it harder for a brand to achieve the 360-degree customer view needed for desiloing journeys.

Where Brands Go from Here

It’s become clear that customers expect brands to recognize them at every touchpoint, and to use that recognition to enhance their experience. Customers also expect to be able to seamlessly jump from one channel to another in any given interaction. Many companies’ experience programs aren’t built to accommodate this trend, resulting in lost opportunities for both a better experience and a stronger bottom line.

How might brands circumvent these problems, desilo their customer journeys, and create a more seamless experience for all? Click here to learn more about how your organization can break these barriers down and achieve Experience Improvement (XI) in my Point of View on this subject.

Retaining customers is one of the best ways to ensure that your brand is building a strong bottom line and an ever-improving experience, but keeping customer churn low is easier said than done. Customer churn is, unfortunately, an unavoidable fact of doing business, but that doesn’t mean that brands have to let it happen in vain. Today, we’re going to give you a quick rundown on understanding why customers leave your brand so that you can prevent future churn, retain loyal clientele, and continuously improve their experience.

Enabling Storytelling

One of the best ways to become aware of friction points within your experience is by letting customers point them out in their own words. We’re not just talking written survey answers, here; experience feedback programs that enable multimedia feedback are among the most powerful tools for learning about problematic or broken touchpoints in your customer journey.

Think about how much more human it is to see and hear customers express their concerns instead of just reading about them. Multimedia feedback empowers brands to understand customer concerns on a much more human level than surveys allow, which is also important for motivating employees. In short, empowering customers to express their concerns in their preferred format and sharing that frank feedback with the relevant teams is one of the best ways to motivate genuine improvement.

Seeking Disclosure

Receiving feedback from current customers is important, but what about past customers? What about the competition’s? The best customer experience platforms are sustained by the best market research, and brands that opt for the former can often receive the latter. Databases, customer panels, and other sources of market learnings are now available at the push of a button, and brands that want to understand their experience from all angles should seek this knowledge out as resources allow.

Once you have all of this feedback and intel from customers both inside and outside your brand, a handy next step is to feed all of that structured data directly into a real-time text analytics engine. This tool is incredibly helpful for brands because it can extract customer sentiment and reinforce organizations’ knowledge of customer churn’s root causes. 

Keeping Churn at Bay

Like we said earlier, brands can’t keep customer churn out of the equation, but they can do a great deal to prevent it with tools and methods like these. Reducing churn in this way is also great not just for churn reduction’s sake, but also for creating a more human experience, instilling greater loyalty in customers, and creating a stronger bottom line.

Want to read more on how you can improve customer retention? Our new eBook walks you through exactly how to build a holistic initiative and the math that will prove the value of your efforts! Check it out here.

Two female collegues having business meeting to discuss how to reduce future customer churn

Reducing churn and retaining a solid base of loyal customers is a constant challenge for brands, which is why setting out to reduce that churn must likewise be a constant company goal. I outlined a variety of churn reduction strategies in my recent point of view document on the subject, but there’s a two-pronged approach that merits an especially close look: talking to past and present customers to reduce future churn.

Talking to Past Customers

You can’t always save customers who have already left your brand for what they believe are greener pastures, but talking to these individuals can yield valuable intel that might save some of your current customer base from doing the same. This methodology is often referred to as win/loss research or Attrition Customer Experience (CX), and its findings are invaluable. Talking to past customers can help brands understand what parts of their experience might be driving customers away, as well as better tell which churn might be controllable or uncontrollable.

Win/loss research also affords brands an opportunity to scout out the competition. Past customers usually aren’t shy about sharing which company they switched to and why they think that competitor suits their needs better. While that criticism might sting a bit, it’s a great way to learn about why customers and prospects choose other companies over you. Thus, talking to customers who’ve already gone out the door is rarely a waste of time.

Talking to Current Customers

Once you’ve discussed your brand experience with past customers, it’s important to incorporate those learnings into saving current, at-risk customers from leaving your organization. Arming yourself with context from past customers can go a long way toward reshaping your approach with current customers, listening to their concerns, and understanding why they may feel one way or another about their own journeys with your brand.

Having a powerful Experience Improvement (XI) platform is a priority to take here too. Tools like sentiment analysis can provide brands powerful intelligence that they can compare with feedback from past customers. Combining all of this information can help brands know not just which touchpoints need improvement, but also how best to meaningfully change those areas to retain current business.

Working Upstream

Combining feedback from past and present customers is one of the best ways that brands can prevent future churn. Organizations can rely on this intelligence to be more proactive about saving at-risk customers, identifying and solving broken touchpoints and other experience issues before they result in a loss. Though this process is work intensive and may not save all of your at-risk relationships, the brands that dedicate themselves to soliciting this feedback from all their customers will come away with less churn, and thus more success, than their peers.

Interested in learning more about reducing customer churn? Click here to read my full-length point of view on the subject and to learn additional strategies for reducing churn at your organization.

You hear the term tossed around in most any meeting focused on customers: “What’s the NPS? How many Promoters do we have? How many Detractors?” You may be asking yourself “What is NPS and what should we be doing with it?” 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple, powerful measure of customer loyalty. By asking customers to rate their likelihood to recommend a product or service on a 1-10 scale, you can gain actionable insights to guide decisions across your business.

Let’s break down NPS calculation and see how it works.

The NPS survey

Essentially, an NPS survey asks your customers this simple question:

Nps question, NPS example, NPS survey, What is NPS

The survey then logs the response and gives the responder a chance to explain their answer in an open-text format.

Nps feedback, NPS question, NPS concept

That’s it! Because the survey is short, sweet, and to the point, customers are more likely to respond. And you’ve just gained valuable information ready to be turned into insights and used to improve your offerings.

Many NPS surveys offer this text box at the bottom of the questionnaire asking for reasoning behind their responses. This is also a valuable tool to gain better insight into your customer’s specific experiences.

Collect NPS Data with a Survey 

Make sure that during the process of NPS calculation you are determining what specific information you are looking for from your audience. Make sure you know what you need feedback on, where you have the bandwidth to improve, and how you want to segment your customers in order to get the most specific results. 

InMoment can help you get instant NPS analytics when you download the NPS software. Want to try it out? Get a free 30-day trial here.

How to Calculate NPS: The NPS Calculation Process

Once you have the customer feedback (step one), the fun part begins with NPS calculation.

Respondents are classified into three groups based on their answers:

  • Promoters: Rating 9 or 10. Loyal customers who are a great source of referrals.
  • Passives:  Rating 7 or 8. Customers who are satisfied with the service but are susceptible to competitors.
  • Detractors: Rating 0 – 6. Unhappy customers who can damage your brand.
Nps coding, NPS calculation, Calculate NPS, What is NPS

What is the NPS Formula, and How Does it Work NPS Calculations?

NPS Calculation gives you a clear indication from one moment to the next of how happy your customers are. Real-time tracking can alert you to threats to your business, allowing you to take quick action. Tracked over time, it gives you insight into which of the company’s actions have resulted in the most customer value. Step three is to find the percentage of promoters and detractors. Lastly, step four is to calculate the NPS score using the information you have acquired so far.

To do the actual NPS calculation, subtract the % of respondents who are Detractors from the % of respondents who are Promoters.

NPS = ((# of Promoters – # of Detractors)/Total Survey Participants) x 100

Interpreting Your NPS Score

Now that you’ve calculated your net promoter score, of course you want to know what the number you ended up with actually means. Net promoter scores are expressed as a number ranging from -100 to +100. Any score above 50 is typically a good NPS. This would be because at least 50% of your company is a promoter, while less than 50% would fall under detractor. The most important thing you can do with your net promoter score is acknowledge it, and try to improve it.

Utilizing Customer Feedback

The answer to the open-ended NPS follow-up question tells you the “why” behind the rating. Mining this text for insights is what makes NPS calculation so powerful – because it gives you rich information on the customer experience you’re providing. Analyze the text answers and use them to guide the actions you take.

NPS Survey Feedback

Don’t forget to follow up with the customer and close the feedback loop. Imagine immediately responding to a Detractor’s complaint, targeting your Passives with an information campaign, or asking a Promoter to review your product online.

Creating Additional Questions for Your NPS Survey

When you create an NPS survey, you typically do so with the sole purpose of measuring NPS. However, sometimes you need to measure NPS and acquire additional information that can help you to improve after you’ve learned your NPS score. This is where you need some key driver analysis. While it’s usually used for Customer Acquisition, key driver analysis can help you identify what your strengths and weaknesses are specifically and how you should address them in the future.

Ongoing Voice of the Customer

Repeat the NPS survey at regular intervals. Segment your NPS by types of customers to understand the “why” behind your score and how your decisions impact customer loyalty.

Once you have NPS calculation down, you’ll be ready to add in additional metrics over time at key customer journey touchpoints. When you combine the feedback from your NPS survey with feedback from CSAT (customer satisfaction) and CES (customer effort) surveys, these 3 core CX metrics give you a great foundation for making business decisions based on the authentic voice of the customer feedback.

Build end-user loyalty. Sign up today for free in-app NPS calculation feedback with InMoment.

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