Earning (and Destroying) Customer Loyalty: Retail CX Trends You Need to Know

I’ve heard a lot of CX and marketing pros declare the old-school type of loyalty -- “faithfulness to which one is bound by pledge or duty” according to Merriam-Webster -- is dead. We wanted test this assumption while also exploring whether there might just be more complexity to customers’ commitments.

Last week, I covered findings from InMoment’s 2018 US Retail CX Trends Report that discussed how brands can earn their customers’ trust. This time I’ll delve into the second theme: Loyalty.

I’ve heard a lot of CX and marketing pros declare the old-school type of loyalty — “faithfulness to which one is bound by pledge or duty” according to Merriam-Webster — is dead. We wanted test this assumption while also exploring whether there might just be more complexity to customers’ commitments.

We started by asking about the object of consumers’ loyalty: do they feel more connected to brands, or to they tend to gravitate to specific products or services?

More than half of consumers gave a mixed response, saying that it depends on the brand or product/service. Slightly more (26 percent versus 21 percent) of customers said they tend to feel more loyalty to brands versus products.  Millennials were the most definitive group, with 30 percent saying they feel loyal to brands.  

For retailers, this is a critical distinction. Consumers are loyal to what and where they find value. Brand-level loyalty may be more about lifestyle or aspiration, while fealty to specific products may be more about efficacy. Of course there are products that have achieved near-brand status like iPhones that probably combine both motivators.

Knowing why customers commit can inform an incredible range of business activities, from brand messages and new product development, to demand generation campaigns and experience design.  

The next topic we looked at round loyalty is how and why it develops, anas well as  unravels.

The data revealed that for both scenarios, it’s a journey. The large majority of shoppers — 80 percent — said they “grew to love” a brand over time; the cumulative effect of great products, service, buying experiences, positive reviews and recommendations from others. Fifteen percent experienced “love at first sight,” and 7 percent committed after a glowing recommendation from a trusted source.

When it comes to breaking up with a brand, nearly two thirds (58 percent) of US consumers said it takes several “really bad” experiences in order to make the hard choice to leave; with 34 percent saying it’s more a matter of “growing apart” as they experienced a gradual decrease in what was special. Just 19 percent of customers said they only give a brand one chance to fail before they leave.

So what does this mean? Brands shouldn’t get too comfortable, though. While the research demonstrates that today’s retail customers can be quite loyal, there’s a limit to their commitment. Nearly 50 percent of customers say they’ve left a brand to which they were loyal to go to a competitor that is better at meeting their needs. Failing to stay relevant will accelerate the exit of even your most loyal customers.

For those fortunate brands that achieve loyalty status with their customers, the benefits are tangible and significant.   

  • Long-term Relationships: A whopping 77 percent of consumers say they’ve held relationships with specific brands for 10 or more years. This is even true of 60 percent of Millennials, despite being relatively young.
  • More, More, More: 61 percent of loyal customers go out of their way to buy from them, and 60 percent will make more frequent purchases (that number rises to 70 percent among Millennials); 50 percent will purchase more products.
  • Tell a Friend: 75 percent of loyal customers will recommend a brand to friends and family.    

Because we’re in the business of customer feedback,  we also wanted to know how loyalty affects customers’ willingness to share data generally, and their feedback about their experience specifically. Here’s what the data revealed:  Customers who feel high levels of trust and loyalty are significantly more likely to share ratings (in the 90 percent range for both) and detailed commentary (both exceeded 70 percent) about their experiences.  A good number (30%) are also willing to hand over personal data (name, age, location, etc.), and 41% are up for sharing their purchase data (how much, what, where) with trusted brands.

While these numbers aren’t astronomical, they’re an important place to start. Establish trust first, and then deliver consistent value over time. It’s a long and complex road, but one brands must travel if they expect savvy customers to had over something they realize is precious.

To learn more about the latest retail CX trends,—including more statistics from our study on consumer loyalty—download the full report: 2018 Retail CX Trends: Trust and Loyalty in the Experience Economy

Employers know that hiring individuals who are a good fit is important to the company’s ultimate success, but not everyone recognizes that hiring is just the beginning. In the healthcare industry in particular, where burnout rates have been increasing at alarming rates, monitoring employee sentiment and getting feedback to improve their engagement is crucial to retaining staff and delivering superior patient experience.

Understanding employee sentiment is a critical responsibility of HR, especially in healthcare

Engaged employees feel internal motivation to go above and beyond the call of duty for patients. For example, an engaged food service worker in a hospital will feel motivated to make sure food is delivered hot. When employees feel more connected to their jobs, they will go the extra mile to provide great quality care and research backs that up.

Keeping health professionals engaged has been shown to have positive impact on:

  • Patient satisfaction
  • Employee Turnover and Absenteeism
  • Patient Loyalty and Advocacy
  • Revenue

Monitoring employee sentiment and making use of feedback

Employee engagement is a challenge no matter what size an organization is, but it is especially difficult and important when you’re a large healthcare company. With most large enterprise organizations, human resources has systems for gathering and monitoring employee feedback channels. But you miss out on an opportunity to improve their employee happiness and engagement if you sit on all the open-ended feedback you receive from employee surveys.

Qualitative feedback can be organized into themes using machine learning

A Fortune 100 healthcare company approached Wootric for help making their voice of employee survey program actionable. This company’s employees already respond to engagement surveys on a regular basis. This provides a score to track over time and rich open-ended feedback, ripe for analysis.

But with thousands of feedback comments waiting to be analyzed, understanding the “why” behind their employee engagement scores was difficult. In addition to that feedback, the company was seeing relevant feedback on review websites like Glassdoor and Indeed. They were interested in this data because it offered a perspective that might not be shared on their internal pulse surveys.

This is a lot of feedback to process.

The good news is, employee feedback typically clusters into topic areas. Wootric text analytics algorithms are trained to recognize, including these themes:

  • Benefits & Compensation
  • Training
  • Systems
  • Workload
  • Management (direct management and overall leadership)
  • Health/wellness

Sentiment & text analytics provide insight into survey comments

The healthcare company now receives themes and uncovered valuable insight in their Wootric dashboard. Each comment is tagging with relevant themes and each tag is assigned a sentiment (positive, negative, neutral). 

In this fictional example dashboard, the human resources team can dig into the bucket of comments associated with “systems”, which covers new technology and hardware.

The algorithms do all the tedious, normally time-consuming, work of reading qualitative feedback and organizing each comment into different buckets with tags. Our data scientists and customer success team then conduct a review of the newly structured data to ensure our client received quality, actionable insights out of the gate.  

Benefits of real-time sentiment analysis of employee feedback

We work with human resource professionals to accomplish these goals:

  • Understand what impacts employee morale

For example, sentiment analysis can help you understand the impact of a roll-out of a new software system or benefit plan. When you have the data, you can move beyond anecdotes and hunches and measure the overall impact.

  • Understand engagement issue by employee role, e.g. doctors, staff

Nurses and surgeons both care for patients, but their responsibilities and goals will be very different from a pharmacist or receptionist. Different roles all have different concerns and enabling employees is much easier when you know who needs what. Segmenting your data by roles helps human resources teams to identify role-specific problems and address different concerns.

  • Use data to guide strategic plans to improve employee satisfaction

You may be hearing feedback from people all the time about how you can improve processes, the working environment, etc, but until you’ve quantified all of that feedback, it’s just anecdotal. Human resources teams are able to prioritize projects to most effectively improve employee satisfaction. There are impactful, strategic wins that you can make hidden in the comments you receive. Be sure not to miss them!

  • Risk management & incident detection

One benefit of analyzing online reviews is that you’ll understand what influences your company’s reputation as an employer. You’ll know how you’re perceived as well as why you’re perceived that way. In addition, anonymity on these kinds of forums means that current employees may be more honest about something serious–including sexual harassment or discrimination.

For our customer, it’s not enough to be on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to medical equipment and methodology. To provide quality care, they have made employee engagement a priority. Taking a modern approach to employee feedback with text and sentiment analytics makes improving employee happiness less about sorting through a flood of data, and all about taking action.

Unlock insight about employee engagement.
Book an InMoment demo.

Four Guiding Principles for CX Metrics with Meaning

CX metrics help us understand our company’s relative position, reinforce expectations and key behaviors in our teams, and quantify our level of impact and achievement.  Because of this, many program owners and stakeholders spend their time agonizing over what questions to ask of their customers. Though this is important, I would like to suggest that CX experts begin with a different approach, asking: What business outcome do we want to influence and why?

When it comes to metrics, the human race is a little obsessed. We measure our weight, height, IQ, wealth, and now our followers on social media. Those of us in customer experience (CX) take metrics even more seriously, and for good reason.

CX metrics help us understand our company’s relative position, reinforce expectations and key behaviors in our teams, and quantify our level of impact and achievement.  Because of this, many program owners and stakeholders spend their time agonizing over what questions to ask of their customers. Though this is important, I would like to suggest that CX experts begin with a different approach, asking: What business outcome do we want to influence and why?

It’s easy to get stuck on what your measuring. After all, it makes your CX program tangible, but when it comes down to it, you want your program to create real impact. That impact can only be shown with the right metrics.

You may be creating the first ever metric framework for your company or you may have historically tracked certain metrics, but have a feeling they just aren’t working for you any more. Either way, if you want to elevate your programs and practices, you’ve got to be deliberate about your metrics. How? Here are four guiding principles for choosing and implementing metrics with meaning:

Principle #1: Design with the End in Mind

It used to be that program owners would start their programs off by turning to each other and asking, “what have we always wanted to know about our customers?” The result was surveys populated with “best guess” questions that provided some information, but not much direction. This method causes a disconnect in the relationship between customer listening, CX improvement, and ROI understanding.

To avoid this confusion, it’s important to start at the end by defining what you want to achieve before you even start. What meaningful financial and intrinsic value can this program drive for your organization? The answer to this question should point you towards more specific metrics; choose the ones that are closely tied to your value proposition, customer promise, and are aligned with your strategy. If you start with your goals in mind, you’ll be able to make sure your metric framework will provide real meaning by helping further your greater goals as a company.

Principle #2: Give the People What They Want

This point may seem obvious for any industry, but it’s meaning requires a little more explanation when it comes to metrics. By this point, I mean that you need to be hypersensitive as to who your stakeholders are when you select metrics for your program. The three most common stakeholder groups I’ve seen in my experience are the company as a whole, it’s employees, and, of course, your customers.

Each of these groups will have specific sets of needs. When selecting metrics, you need to tailor your choices—and the messaging with which you deliver them— to align with the assets of the business and experience those groups most care about. For example: the metrics you choose for your company will align more with business results, whereas for your customers it will concern more of overall satisfaction or ease.

Principle #3: Quit Living in the Past

I like to follow up this third principle, “quit living in the past,” with “unless your boss says you have to.” When I say the past, I am referencing past data and practices. Most often people don’t want to mess with their historical data, so they’re afraid to ask questions in new ways or start new initiatives for fear that the data won’t match up. To them I say that if you allow yourself to be paralyzed by the politics of historical data, your program will never evolve and therefore will never improve.

The way forward is to have an honest conversation about metrics with meaning. In this conversation, you and your other stakeholders will find that your metrics have to change as your business changes. Otherwise, your metric framework will be out of context, therefore limiting the value of any insight gained from that framework. Living in the past is then the common culprit of flat metrics; whereas adapting, insightful metrics evolve with your business so they can inform and inspire real change.

Principle #4: There’s Value in a Good Story

Although metrics are vital for you program, it’s important to remember this Albert Einstein quote: “Not everything that counts can be counted.” Traditional scales, ratings, and numbers may only take you so far. The future of metrics lies in your ability to leverage unstructured feedback to shape what you will measure and why.  In other words, we can modernize the approach and use customer’s qualitative story about their experience to create metrics that matter.

In unstructured feedback, customers are already telling you what they care about most. At InMoment, we have developed a sentiment scoring algorithm that interprets the value of the customer experience based on what they write (or tell you via voice or video feedback) instead of just what they score. In a very compelling case study with an InMoment client, we found that our sentiment score trends exactly as NPS and OSAT scoring; and can even be used to predict scores, forward and back. How’s that for a game changing approach to metrics?!

When it comes to deciding on your metric framework, you have two choices: are you curious about your customer experience, or are you serious about using the right metrics to get the right intelligence for real business impact? I don’t know about you, but the decision seems pretty obvious to me. When you choose your metrics based on the value and meaning they present, you set yourself up for a CX program that will propel your organization into a future of success.

If you want to learn more about crafting metrics with meaning—including specific case studies and practical approaches—watch the full webinar, “CX Metrics: Choosing and Implementing the Right Ones for Your Business!” Click here to access!

What’s your biggest problem as a Product Dev professional? Too many demands and not enough time? Limited resources? Oddly enough, none of those topped the list for Hiten Shah’s crowd.

Hiten Shah (of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Quick Sprout fame) recently wrote in his newsletter that “the problems people have on Product teams fall into two main categories: Customer Feedback and Alignment.” This conclusion came after Hiten asked his readers to share their biggest product problems, and in more than 100 replies, those two themes emerged as the leaders.

Wootric helps customers gather, organize, categorize and analyze customer feedback – at volume – every day. And we’ve got a few insights into how Product teams can solve the issues that come with customer-centricity – while improving alignment at the same time.

Let’s go through the problems real Product professionals sent Hiten Shah point by point.

“Fast/Effective ways to quickly recap and synthesize qualitative research”

Qualitative data – ie. freeform responses versus ratings or multiple choice answers – are notoriously difficult to sift through and analyze. It’s only recently that, with advanced technology and machine learning, it’s become much easier to tag, sort, and assign sentiment to qualitative feedback at scale.

CXInsight™ Dashboard tagging segmentation screenshot
Source: CXInsight™ Dashboard

Tagging, in particular, is a huge time-saver when you switch from just manual tagging to auto-tagging. Tagging comments with their major themes is the first step towards conducting frequency analysis to identify trending topics – or find relevant feedback with a click.

Using an NPS survey with an open-ended comments section, for example, you might find that your ‘detractors’ (low scorers) comments tend to be tagged with “slow loading time” or you may see a specific feature request recurring.

Yep, modern customer feedback software should be able to deliver every comment with a feature request, for example, tagged and prioritized by frequency, from the highest-value customers, in about a second.

You can even use tags to route specifically tagged feedback straight to the appropriate department for follow-up. No need to hunt for bugs – the bugs will come to you! (Don’t they always?)

“It’s [customer feedback] very subjective and sometimes doesn’t have context, therefore I take it with a grain of salt, but engineers may not see it that way and want to address the feedback immediately.”

When your customer feedback comes primarily through surveys that *don’t* include open-ended responses (to gather all of that golden qualitative data), it’s impossible to get the context you need to evaluate the issue and possibly solve it.

But understanding the why behind NPS, CES and CSAT scores (to name a few) isn’t all the context you need to decide where to allot your time and resources.

You literally have to consider the source.

Is the feedback coming from a high-value, ideal client? Is your existing survey solution capable of identifying those markers?

Did you know that it’s even possible to target specific customer segments with survey campaigns?

And for even more context – you can target customer surveys based on product milestones. For example, you can set a CES survey to deploy after new feature use to find out how easy (or difficult) new customers think it is to use.

“Feedback overwhelm – how to prioritize what users want/need the most.”

An overwhelming number of customer comments can leave you feeling like you are trying to drink from a fire hydrant. It’s time to talk about the wonders of machine learning.

Historically, extracting insights from piles of unstructured feedback has been difficult, expensive and time-consuming. That is not the case today. When you need insight from feedback at scale, it is time to invest in text and sentiment analysis using software with natural language processing.

Machine learning has come a loooong way. Yes, algorithms must be trained to understand your company and customers, so chose a software vendor that will keep their team in the loop and ensure you’re getting good insights right off the bat. Then the software just gets better and better at telling you what is most important to your customers.

Feedback categorized by theme with sentiment breakdown
Source: Wootric CXInsight™ Dashboard

Wootric CXInsight™ combines natural language processing with sentiment analysis to categorize feedback based on what matters most for your customers. When you know why your customers love you — or don’t — prioritization becomes a much easier task.

“Having a regular cadence of customer interaction to develop insights and product intuition.”

Okay, there’s no excuse – this is so easily doable. You can set any CX survey you want to deploy on a regular basis, or, deploy after customers complete specific milestones. Having to go get customer feedback shouldn’t be something you have to think about. It should be automatic! Part of your daily, weekly, or monthly routine.

But, it’s only that easy if you’ve got software that makes it that easy – let’s be honest here. Modern customer feedback software can integrate with Slack, Intercom, or whatever you use, as well as deliver surveys to customers while they’re in your app, and deliver it to you tagged, sorted, and prioritized.

Regularly!

You can have your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction and will know immediately if there’s any fluctuation. As an added bonus, give a pat on the back to whoever built an update or solution for customers so they can see the results in action!

“My main problem is to get to know our audience and talk directly to them.”

Surveys are great – we love them. But you know what? Even with a qualitative feedback field, a survey can’t take the place of a real, person-to-person conversation. And usually, the biggest barrier to having those conversations is making the time.

We can’t pick up the phone for you, but we can save you time. Enough time to schedule interviews with your customers and get even deeper insights that they may never tell you in writing.

“In Product we’re expected to be customer-centric. We’re supposed to get feedback and talk to customers all the time. It’s literally our day job. But that’s on top of making sure we’re focused on building the right things and helping our teams ship too.”

Here’s the thing, Product friends. You aren’t the only department that has to be “customer-centric” and talk to customers all the time and review steady streams of feedback. So to make this part of your job easier, you might have to reach out to other departments and make customer-centricity a multi-team effort.

If you have a Customer Success department, start there – you might find that the Customer Success Manager is your new BFF. They’re also talking to customers every day, and in many ways, they’re closer to the problems customers face than you are. Most CSMs would be delighted to build better relationships with their Product Dev departments, working together to answer the question “What can we do to help our customers achieve success?”

“It’s not easy and it isn’t getting easier. Customer feedback can come from anywhere: Customer support requests, live chats, social media, the sales team, customer reviews, competitor research, and more. Adding to the pile are the endless opinions about what to do with the feedback from people on our teams.”

It’s not easy – true. But it is getting easier to solve qualitative feedback issues with modern customer feedback software!

Sorry, we can’t help with the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem – that’s right up there with finding the cure for the common cold. We find that if you have to pick one source to guide product, NPS feedback is the going to be the most actionable.  That said, when it comes to gathering customer feedback from many sources into one, easily searchable place, modern technology comes to the rescue again.

What you want to look for is a customer feedback program that can pull all of customer comment sources together, like NPS or CSAT feedback, user interviews, support tickets, app store reviews, social and analyze those comments in a way that lets you see the big picture and slice & dice by theme, sentiment, survey date, and data source.

Tackle your unstructured, qualitative feedback with InMoment CXInsight™.

4 Areas to Perfect for a Mature CX Program

Every CX program is different.  Each company has a unique set of internal and external circumstances that require a customized action plan.  In order to create the right CX strategy, it is important to understand where you are and where you want to take your program.  From there, any program can take the right steps toward success.

In the world of customer experience (CX), your efforts can successfully differentiate you from your peers, but in order to achieve this, you need to focus on more than simply listening to customers and acting on that data.  A successful CX program requires continuous evolution and advancement to adapt to a company’s ever-changing landscape. When working with brands to optimize their CX programs we refer to this program evolution as CX Maturity.

Every CX program is different.  Each company has a unique set of internal and external circumstances that require a customized action plan.  In order to create the right CX strategy, it is important to understand where you are and where you want to take your program.  From there, any program can take the right steps toward success.

In order to figure out where your program stands in terms of CX strategy, alignment, and engagement, there are four major areas you need to consider for CX Maturity:

Cultural

The cultural aspect of CX Maturity refers to how well your organization is aligned with your CX vision, program, and its goals. An advanced program is well socialized and employees are familiar with the program.  They are invested, as the culture of the organization is customer-centric and puts the customer at the center of all decisions. There is also a well-established cross functional team, CX strategy, and employee engagement program.

Technological

A CX program that is technologically mature will have an advanced customer listening program that includes collecting, analyzing, and reporting capabilities.  This technology allows companies to transform the way they interact with customers, to start intelligent conversations, and to utilize direct, indirect, and inferred feedback.  It will incorporate AI, advanced data science, and cutting-edge features that transform simple metrics into meaning.

Analytical

Mature analytical programs incorporate customer and employee experience data as well as operational, CRM, segmentation, and other data sources to uncover real intelligence that impacts the business. Leveraging these data sources creates a holistic view of the company and enables you to get insights that siloed data cannot provide.  These programs also leverage Voice of Employee data to understand internal employee’s perspective on the customer experience. Mature programs are able to get to the bottom of customer issues, discover root cause, and act on customer intelligence.

Business Value

Last, but possibly most important, is the question of whether or not your program provides you with real business value. CustomerThink recently showed that less than one-third of CX professionals are seeing tangible results from their CX program.  A program that has reached full CX maturity will have a drawn out ROI framework, complete with a detailed plan for measuring success. CX metrics are tied to overall business objectives and the CX team is able to show ties to business outcomes. The value of the program is well known throughout the company.

When you are able to assess each of these individual areas of your organization, you can piece together a clear picture of the maturity of your CX program. After your assessment, you can then set goals, create a plan, and get on your way to evolving your CX program.

I think in almost every industry, there is a sense of nostalgia for how things “used to be done.” I say “almost” because I know that for the customer experience (CX) industry, the way things used to be done brings one thing to mind: simple, single point customer surveys.

It’s an ugly truth, but surveys used to be the go-to method—or even the only method—for anyone looking to gather customer data. It may have worked at the time, but thankfully, we know better today.

The fact is that the modern customer doesn’t want to answer questions about what they bought and where they bought it. (After all, with all the technology available today, we should already have that information from transactional data.) Customers also don’t want to spend large amounts of their valuable time going through pages and pages of questions when they only wanted to comment on their experience.

So if the old methods aren’t creating a great feedback experience for your customers, what will work? Today, the key to creating a survey that will actually improve the customer experience is a simple shift in mindset:

Stop interrogating. Start conversations.

Whenever I think of interrogation, I think of the cliche police scene where a suspect is sitting at a table beneath a harsh spotlight while a serious looking detective drills them about what they already suspect the person has done.

There are a couple of things wrong with this interrogation picture when you apply it to customer experience. Firstly, you should never make your customer feel like they’re in the hot seat by firing question after question at them. Second, you should never ask a question that you already have the answer to. Third, interrogating the customer is not focusing on their experience, it’s focusing on what you want to know. Essentially, when your surveys feel like interrogations, they aren’t improving the customer experience. They’re taking away from it.

When you focus on starting a conversational survey, the picture completely changes because of one major fact: conversations are customer-focused. They are mindful of the customer’s time and don’t ask too many questions (they definitely don’t ask unnecessary questions.) Most importantly, they focus on what the customer wants, not what they want to get out of the customer.

So before you set out to create your next survey, think to yourself: Am I interrogating or am I starting a conversation?

Looking for a better way to ask? Check out our first of it’s kind Digital Intercept tool that helps you enhance your customers’ online experience—without interrupting it. Check out the free Digital Intercept eBook!

If you follow the InMoment blog, you know that we believe loyalty is the end all be all of customer experience efforts. If customers are loyal to your brand, it means they spend money with you, interact with you, and give you feedback—even better, they do so consistently. This means plenty of benefits for your organization, but it also requires quite a bit of consistency on your part.

A consistent experience is widely recognized as one of the major contributors to overall customer loyalty. Take it from Footlocker’s Director of Customer Experience Tyler Saxey, who had this to say on the subject: “That’s how you drive loyalty the most in my perspective: value and consistency. Think about Amazon. You are almost shocked if your product doesn’t arrive in 2 days, and you are willing to give them a break if it happens. If you consistently succeed, you will drive revenue. If you consistently fail, people will find other places to spend their money.”

To break it down even more, memorable experiences that happen consistently lead to loyalty, which increases a customer’s lifetime value, which increases revenue. Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

In order to get to the benefits, however, it’s vital to understand why a uniform brand experience means so much to your customers. Here are three reasons why consistency drives loyalty:

Consistency makes you reliable.

This might sound a little weird, but stick with me here. Think about your favorite comfort food. There’s a reason why that mac and cheese, fried chicken, or pizza is more than just a dish you like. The difference between it and any old salad is that your comfort food elicits an emotional response. No matter where you are in life, you can rely on that simple meal to give you a sense of comfort.

In the same way, a customer should be able to rely on you to create a certain feeling for them. Maybe they’re excited because they know you will always ship their purchases quickly or that when they call you, they’ll be met with a happy and helpful representative. No matter what, that dependability gives your customer a sense of confidence and trust because they know you can be relied upon. If they can rely upon you to deliver every time, they’ll keep coming back for more.

Consistency makes you recognizable.

In today’s crowded market, everyone is looking for a way to stand out. Everywhere you look there are new, more interesting ways that brands are marketing or re-branding themselves to differentiate from the competition.

I would like to suggest that one of the best ways to stand out is consistency. By keeping your color schemes, messaging, product presentation, and any other detail uniform across your organization, your brand will be instantly recognizable to customers. Whenever they have a need for a product or service in your industry, they will automatically think of you if you keep it consistent.

Consistency makes you a part of their lifestyle.

Because you are a consistency rockstar, customers now think of you whenever they think of the industry you’re in. Because of that simple association, whenever they need a new pair of shoes, a new car, or a vacation, they will automatically google your brand first. If they’ve bought from you before and had a great experience, they are likely to come back the next time they’re in the market for your services.

Take Starbucks as an example. I bet you can think of at least one person in your life that is a “Starbucks person.” Whenever they’re out and about and in need of coffee, they pop right over to the nearest drive thru. This is because their experience with the coffee giant has been so consistent that they don’t even need to think of where to go when they need caffeine. The brand has become so embedded in their lifestyle that the customer is guaranteed to be a regular.

If you look at it from this perspective, consistency really is key to driving customer loyalty. It helps customers form emotional attachments and automatic associations with your brand, as well as making brand a part of their routine as a consumer. In short, consistency helps you create a solid relationship with customers, and that’s a pretty big win for your customer experience and your bottom line.

Looking to become a consistency rockstar? InMoment’s CX Intelligence Cloud empowers you to identify customer pain points both on a larger scale and at a location level. To learn how this solution can be tailored to your brand, schedule a demo with one of our CX strategists today!

CX Strategy: 5 Ways to Develop CX-Centric DNA

Becoming customer-centric doesn’t just happen. It begins with a vision which, over time, becomes a fully-immersive reason for and way of doing business. It’s more than an initiative—it’s a business discipline—a way of life within a brand.

Becoming customer-centric doesn’t just happen. It begins with a vision which, over time, becomes a fully-immersive reason for and way of doing business. It’s more than an initiative—it’s a business discipline—a way of life within a brand. Here are five key areas that serve as building blocks for infusing customer centricity into your brand.

Vision: A vision is not simply a mission statement; it should specifically tie to your brand’s promise and guiding values. It should be clearly defined and communicated to employees and understood—and expected—by customers. When you have a clear vision, you’re more likely to follow through, and more importantly, you’re motivated to improve.

Executive Commitment: In an ideal world, customer-centric culture and business practices begin at the top. In fact, researchers and analysts believe that if the CEO is not leading the CX conversation, then a company will never become a CX leader and reap the related benefits. CX professionals need to build a compelling business case that supports executive goals so that the relationship between CX success and the bottom line is evident.

People: Once you define your vision, it must be infused across hiring, training, coaching, and professional development to build and nurture a customer-centric culture for the long run. Your vision should help define the specific behaviors and traits of employees required to deliver on the brand promise. This means shifting hiring practices from a skill-based to a personality-fit mindset so you can hire within the scope of your company’s customer experience vision.

Environment: Maintaining a customer-centered company takes a comprehensive commitment, and incentives that match those objectives. Find ways to recognize people for upholding the brand’s promise and reward those who continually strive to improve the customer experience. Also, design KPIs, track net promoter score, and establish communication and recognition programs to reinforce the message that you both hear and heed employee contributions.

Communication: A vision is only effective as the way it is communicated throughout the organization, and to the world. Internally, discuss expectations, listen to the voice of the customer, list challenges, and recognize successes constantly.. There must be continuous follow up and clear, consistent communication to all employees. Externally, publicly state and provide updates to investors, analysts, media, and other external stakeholders regarding CX efforts and their impact on the business. This not only brings you credit where it’s due and ensures future accountability, but helps attract the right kind of employees—and customers—to your business.

Cultivating CX-centric DNA is not only essential to creating lasting relationships with your customers, but it is also a foundational pillar for a successful CX Strategy.

4 Ways AI can Empower Contact Center Agents

Contact center leaders have agonized over the decision of whether or not to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) over the traditional human approach to customer experience (CX) since the introduction of this innovative tech. However, in a recent CustomerThink webinar, I proposed that it isn’t an either/or choice between AI and agent; instead, I believe it is vital to think of AI as an enabler for customer experience, not a replacement.

Contact center leaders have agonized over the decision of whether or not to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) over the traditional human approach to customer experience (CX) since the introduction of this innovative tech. However, in a recent CustomerThink webinar, I proposed that it isn’t an either/or choice between AI and agent; instead, I believe it is vital to think of AI as an enabler for customer experience, not a replacement.

My segment of the webinar was called “Harness AI to Grow High-Value Human Relationships.” In it, I explained that AI especially enables the core of CX—the human element—and makes the relationships that result from human interactions more effective by arming contact center leaders and agents with the information and feedback they need to make a positive impact.

Sounds pretty great, right? If it does, you’re probably asking how you can use AI in your contact center to get these results. Well, here are four specific ways artificial intelligence can empower contact center agents to improve the customer experience:

Execute Real-Time Solutions

AI-powered humans essentially have information about their customer at their fingertips. With each call, AI can help decode customer thoughts, sentiments, and opinions about the interaction with the call center agent. After analysis, AI then can store all of this data specific to each agent and mine it for trends and other insights. The difference? Each call center agent gets personalized feedback on exactly what they did right and what they can do better in specific interactions with their customer. Even better, the “customer coaching” is feedback they get is based on recent interactions and is ongoing, so they can constantly improve in real time.

Create Personal Interactions

When contact center agents are powered by AI, they get the personal feedback that allows them to better relate with their customers. Customers themselves have said that when their contact center agents have access to AI generated information—such as information on previous interactions, interaction preferences, or insights from speech analysis—their interactions are more personal and relevant. Simply having the knowledge that a customer is frustrated allows agents to respond in a human, compassionate way and therefore create a relationship with that customer.  

Get Specific

We have also found that having access to AI-generated data helps agents to have better recall. They can more accurately remember recent conversations or feedback so they can take an informed approach when solving customer problems. Agents also get a sense of expertise when it comes to recurring customer situations because they know they have been there before and have the feedback data to determine the best approach.

Gain Proof of Accomplishment

Here’s a not so pleasant truth: before AI, coaching for agents had a negative bias. It was constantly looking for a chink in the armor when it came to an agent’s approach. While I agree that it is important for agents to constantly improve, it can be hard for them to do so if they feel like they’re constantly doing something wrong. Contrary to the negativity, we find that 80% of feedback is positive, so it is best to acknowledge that good in order to empower contact center agents. AI can help agents see what they’re doing well and gain a sense of ownership over their feedback. This gives them the motivation they need to take that other 20% and turn the negatives to positives.

Ultimately, AI helps contact center agents become an active participant in customer interactions (rather than a victim), have more control over their individual coaching, and feel more empowered to improve. When their work has obvious meaning, agents can appreciate their impact on other humans and create loyalty-driving relationships everyday.

This guest post was written by Martin Ceisel, the lead Content Strategist at MindTouch. His hobbies include writing, writing, and writing some more. MindTouch is a self-service platform that helps companies improve support agent productivity, increase ticket deflection, and fuel self-service support.

A quick look at some Net Promoter Score benchmarks will quickly reveal a painful truth: bad NPS scores happen. It’s inevitable.NPS Calculation

The worst response to your company’s detractors, though, is no response at all. So, how to best learn from bad Net Promoter Scores and use them to improve the customer experience?

Here are a few strategies to consider:

Do your research

Look at all of the support tickets your detractor customer has put in and read all the notes that your agents have written about these interactions. Review the goals they had when they initially became a customer. Check which help articles they may have read. This will give you important context when you close the loop with the customer.

Respond promptly and personally

Though the customers behind bad Net Promoter Scores might still be feeling the sting of their negative experience, receiving a prompt response to their NPS survey might help turn the tide. If nothing else, a personal response is an opportunity to take the NPS survey beyond a transactional call and response to an ongoing (and honest!) conversation. You’ll be surprised how much constructive feedback a simple “What can we do to improve your experience?” might unlock.

Segment response types

What customer group or business segment is driving the bulk of your bad Net Promoter Scores? One way to find out is to segment NPS scores to identify hotspots. You might find that a particular point in the customer journey, such as onboarding or renewal, is creating an inordinate number of detractors. Or maybe your NPS from product A is higher or lower than product B. Ask yourself why one group of customers is more successful than others. By categorizing responses, you can drill down and identify actionable takeaways. One way to see themes is to create reason codes, a method of categorizing responses so they can be organized and analyzed.

Don’t get tunnel vision

Remember that NPS is just one measure of customer sentiment. Don’t forget key metrics like customer effort (CES) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT). These, too, are important metrics that can lead you to the root cause of negative customer experiences. Regarding NPS specifically, consider trends in your industry. What are the NPS benchmarks you should be aiming for? This will help you decide how urgent an action to take—which bad Net Promoter Scores to prioritize first.

Because it’s about the whole customer experience

Tunnel vision makes for a good segue to my close: remember the reason we pay such close attention to customer sentiment. Perusing, parsing, and responding to bad Net Promoter Scores is about more than improving your company’s own internal metrics. It’s about improving the customer experience. If we can’t deliver low-effort customer experiences throughout the customer journey—if we don’t demonstrate a commitment to reading and responding to what our customers are telling us—we risk losing those customers entirely.

Make follow up on Net Promoter Score feedback convenient with InMoment’s many integrations.

3 Ways Voice Can Take Your Feedback to the Next Level

Of all the technologies to be excited about, voice feedback is definitely toward the top of the list. With the ability to provide better data and a more convenient, technologically advanced way to interact with customers, it has the ability to revolutionize the way you collect feedback and the quality of that feedback.

At InMoment, we believe that interacting or listening to your customer shouldn’t just take place at a single point; we believe that you should be listening to your customer whenever, wherever, and however they reach out to you. Because this is such a core belief of ours, we are always looking for new, valuable, and relevant ways for you to collect feedback.

In the recent history of customer experience (CX), speech-to-text has been a favorite talking point when it comes to giving your customers options. Speech-to-text is also known as automated speech transcription, or technology that automatically recognizes digitized speech wavelengths and then converts that speech to text. While this tech is great for translating comments that can then be run through text analytics, there’s a new player on the scene of CX feedback.

Voice feedback takes speech-to-text a level deeper, using AI to analyze a recording of a customer’s actual speech—and all of the detail that comes along with it. Also known as speech analysis, this technology is able to recognize customer tone, pitch, and volume to determine customer sentiment and emotion.

Essentially, voice feedback takes traditional text and speech-to-text feedback to the next level. Need more reasons why? Here are three specific ways that voice can enhance your CX feedback!

Emotional Context

There’s a reason why you shouldn’t have high-stakes or emotional conversations via text message: there are some things that just don’t translate in a text. The closest you can get to a change in tone is using ALL CAPS, and we all know that just makes it seem like you’re yelling at someone. When you analyze voice feedback, you aren’t missing out on those emotional indicators like tone, pitch, and volume. This gives a customer’s words emotional context, which in turn gives you much more data on how that customer is actually feeling (and as we all know, richer data means richer intelligence).

Convenient for Customers

Your customers are busy people, so it’s best that you give them feedback opportunities that fit easily into their daily routines. Traditional text or even speech-to-text is much more time consuming, requiring customers to type in or speak slowly and clearly in order for their comment to be translated correctly. Voice feedback gives them the ability to multitask and be completely hands-free when giving feedback. For instance, if you are using voice in a post-service survey at an auto shop, your customer can leave you feedback on their drive home. It’s quick, convenient, and doesn’t require your customer to set aside time to complete a survey.

Stay Current

Voice feedback is also compatible with the technological must-haves of today: voice assistants. To give you an idea of how many people will be able to leave you feedback via the Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana, here are some stats:

From these numbers, it’s clear that voice assistants are becoming a staple in your customers’ households. By equipping your CX program with voice analytic capabilities, you are giving your customers an opportunity to interact with you using a device that consumers are clearly excited about. Even better, they can leave you feedback handsfree and from their living room.

Of all the technologies to be excited about, voice feedback is definitely toward the top of the list. With the ability to provide better data and a more convenient, technologically advanced way to interact with customers, it has the ability to revolutionize the way you collect feedback and the quality of that feedback. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

To learn more about the technology that can help you interact with your customers whenever, wherever, and however, schedule a demo with an InMoment CX Strategist today!

“What grade did you get?”

Do you remember getting asked that question in grade school? Or maybe you were the one asking it? Humans like to know how they’re doing compared to everyone else.

This carries over into customer experience as well. At Wootric, we advise companies on setting up an effective Net Promoter Score (NPS) program. We get asked questions about NPS industry benchmarks all the time.

In general, we believe focusing on an external NPS benchmark is not incredibly helpful.

The Net Promoter System is the quantification of customer loyalty and the process for improving it over time. The power of this system lies in the analysis of feedback and the action taken based on that analysis.

However, net promoter score benchmarks are still useful in certain cases, which is what this article is all about.

If you’re unfamiliar with NPS, here’s a quick rundown:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric between -100 and 100 that captures the propensity of a company’s customers to attract and refer new business or/and repeat business.

NPS also stands for the Net Promoter System®, which was built around the Net Promoter Score. It is a model that ties a corporation’s bottom line to customer happiness and loyalty.

Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Learn how to modernize your NPS program for growth and higher loyalty.

In the NPS survey, customers rate their likelihood to recommend your company on a scale of 0-10. To get your Net Promoter Score, take the percentage of people who are happy and willing to recommend your product or service (those who respond with a 9 or 10) — “promoters”– and subtract the percentage of people who would not be willing to recommend your product or service — (score of 0-6) “detractors.”

NPS Calculation

For example, a +50 NPS means that the company has more than 50% promoters and less than 50% detractors, so generally an NPS score of +50 is, indeed, great! You may see scales out there that say +30 is a decent score, and that +80 or greater is the ultimate dream score.

To learn more about NPS, get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score, which teaches how to modernize your NPS program for growth and higher loyalty.

Net Promoter Score industry benchmarks

There are two different types of NPS: absolute and relative. Absolute NPS refers to the NPS in and of itself, and comparing the score with what is generally considered a “good” or “bad” score. Relative NPS is taking into account the average NPS within an industry, which takes into account the factors that could affect an average Net Promoter Score, and can change the NPS benchmarks you set.

While an absolute NPS goal is nice and simple, it can be helpful to take a look at what others in your industry have been able to achieve, since every industry is different and has unique relative NPS results. The relative Net Promoter Scores generally achieved in each industry help construct what are called the NPS industry benchmarks. NPS Industry benchmarks give you a way to evaluate your NPS relative to your competitors. They help control for factors that often create major differences in what is considered a good NPS score.

Oftentimes, other companies in your industry have established an average NPS for you to use as a net promoter score benchmark. If you make smartphones or other tech hardware, for example, companies like Apple have been tracking NPS for years.

To get averages and examples from your industry, try reports from the Fortune 500.

NPS Benchmark variance between industries

Let’s take a look at some examples of net promoter score benchmarks according to your industry.

Let’s say you have an NPS of +50. As we explained, that’s already pretty good! But if you’re a department store or specialty store, you are actually below the NPS benchmark (+62) for the industry.

Walmart pharmacies have an NPS score of +32. Considering the highest score is +100, you’d guess that they’d be lukewarm with this score, but I’m sure that the folks in charge of customer experience there are actually ecstatic. Walmart pharmacies have one of the highest NPS scores within the drug store & pharmacy industry.

Compare this number to the software industry, where +34 is the average. Becoming a leader in the software industry would mean having an NPS in the +60 range, like Salesforce (+66) and Adobe (+62).

If I tell you that the industry average NPS for laptop computer manufacturers is +43, can you guess what Apple’s NPS is? Consider their brand reputation and customer loyalty…

In 2018, Apple’s laptop product team reported an NPS of +63. You probably got pretty close, since you knew the industry average! This is why relative score comparison by industry is more useful than evaluation based on an absolute scale.

Caveats for using NPS industry benchmarks

Unfortunately, NPS benchmark programs aren’t always as helpful as you’d hope. This comes down to the nature of surveying for feedback. There are so many contributing factors to an NPS benchmark, such as:

  • Which channels you use to survey customers
  • Demographics and habits of your customer base
  • Customer tolerance levels
  • The size of your competition
  • The difficulty of building brand loyalty
  • External circumstances (such as a global pandemic)
  • When and how often you ask
  • Whether you have enough data to be statistically significant or not

All of these factors can have varying effects on your overall NPS score. For example, your competitor may ask the NPS question within the context of a longer annual brand survey, while you survey using just the NPS question after a transaction. These will have different consequences for the feedback you gather. If you don’t have enough feedback coming in, your NPS may vary significantly from quarter to quarter or month to month.

Bear in mind, a ‘good NPS score’ doesn’t just depend on your industry, since it’s not difficult to game the system. It’s not always fair to compare your NPS score to another company’s NPS score because you don’t know their survey methods, or their employee compensation plans.

When competitive individuals are incentivized based on NPS score, things can get ugly.

A motivated person or company could improve their numbers by letting their customers know that positive feedback would mean a lot to them or by only showing the survey to customers who are positively inclined. They might offer incentives to customers to complete the survey. Clearly, the feedback received from these methods will lead to an inflated NPS score that is not a useful comparison for those using a more objective survey process.  

Setting an NPS goal if you don’t have a benchmark

If no Net Promoter Score benchmark exists for your industry, benchmark against yourself.

The great thing about NPS is that it is an actionable metric. It’s a number that you can rally the company around as a north star to guide improvement efforts.

“A good NPS score is one that is better than the last.”
– Jessica Pfeifer, CCO & Co-founder of Wootric

Remember, NPS isn’t just a score. It’s a system that’s meant to drive business improvement in product and customer experience. It helps you identify and close the loop with unhappy customers and solve their specific problems in real time.

Your goal is to boost customer loyalty and retention, and that happens by reading verbatim comments to understand the why behind the scores you receive. By making changes based on customer feedback, and responding quickly to detractors, you will naturally see your NPS improve. And gains in NPS correlate with revenue growth.

How to report NPS

After all this, you will want to report numbers to the rest of the team on a regular basis. NPS should be shared along with other monthly or quarterly metrics like revenue, new customers and customer churn.

We understand that, so here’s what we recommend:

  • Instead of fixating on your score in the absolute sense, we recommend focusing on improving your score over time. Understand NPS as a trend over several periods, like if you were looking at a stock’s price.Trends-NPS-with-SaaS-segmentation
  • Determine the business goals of your NPS program, then report NPS in relation to the goals. For instance, if you are trying to improve retention, report NPS alongside churn data.
  • Pay attention to trending topics in your verbatim responses. Reporting these topics will help everyone understand what’s important to your customers, and the pain points they experience. Share what customers love and what they don’t love about your company with internal stakeholders. Then you can work to make those points as frictionless as possible. 

Note: For startups, be sure to read and respond to every single comment. As you grow, you’ll start needing aggregate and to pull themes from customer comments. To automate that process, check out AI-powered text and sentiment analysis.

  • Segment your Net Promoter Score by relevant customer groups. For example, this could be by user role (in the SaaS example above), geography, or size/frequency of purchase–whatever drives your business. This will help you pay close attention to groups that are critical to your business success. Learn more about segmentation here.
  • If you want to compare your score to a competitor, choose a company in your industry that you admire and use their score as an aspirational benchmark. Many companies have volunteered their NPS scores to research and reports such as this one by the Fortune 500.

Measure NPS and work to improve it over time.  Dig into customer comments and close the loop with customers. You will learn their needs, and their pain points, and have plenty of guidance to make those improvements. Both your NPS and your customer retention rates are sure to improve. 

Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

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