Three Ways a CX Mindset can Power Your Loyalty Marketing Program

In my last post, I discussed the expanding role of the CMO from steward of the brand to caretaker of the end-to-end customer relationship. While this transition has been recognized by various studies, it has been especially evident in my own experience as Chief Marketing Officer at InMoment. In fact, my position gives me an even more interesting and unique perspective: I have a front row seat to new developments in the marketing world and to the evolution of the customer experience (CX) industry.

Today’s marketers are increasingly seeing customer experience fall under their umbrella of duties, and it’s easy to confuse CX efforts with traditional marketing approaches such as loyalty marketing programs. However, marketers should be warned that this is a place where “similar” definitely does not mean “equal.”

Loyalty marketing programs refer to a company-wide initiative that is focused on growing and retaining existing customers by selling them more. CX programs help businesses understand the customer/brand relationship and what makes the customer loyal to the brand in the first place. The key difference between the two is in their approach: loyalty marketing is selling—often through incentives—while customer experience focuses on the ongoing conversation with the customer to then drive a deeper sense of loyalty.

This is where a traditional approach to loyalty programs goes wrong: At the end of the day, your customers don’t want to be bought with coupons, infrequent freebies, and discounts. While they appreciate them, they aren’t what makes them loyal. Customers want to feel valued and heard. If you look through the lens of customer experience, you can reset your loyalty marketing programs to take a more holistic, relationship-centric approach that will truly impress your customers.

Here are three specific ways a CX mindset can help you take your loyalty program to the next level:

Craft a Consistent Experience

Each year, InMoment surveys both brands and customers to unearth the latest trends in customer experience. The 2018 CX Trends Report revealed that consumers across all industries are creeped out by the way companies use their personal data and are therefore more reluctant to share that data. This can be a massive problem for loyalty marketing programs as they require customers to enroll by sharing some form of personal data. So how can a CX mindset help you solve this possible customer objection? One word: consistency.

Customers need to know that they can trust your brand from the get-go. If they’re receiving mixed messages in policy, employee interaction, or overall experience, they aren’t going to know what to expect and will be less likely to trust you with their information. If you approach this problem with a CX mindset, you know that you need to dedicate resources to unearth areas of brand inconsistency so you can streamline, hire, and train appropriately and put the best foot forward before asking for customer data.

If customers have a great impression of who you are as a brand, their positive and consistent experiences will inspire the trust they need to join your loyalty program.

Provide the Right Perks

Though perks alone won’t drive true brand loyalty, they are incredibly necessary to provide what customers expect when they sign up. However, your efforts can be all for nought if you aren’t providing the right incentives.

According to that same CX Trends report, customers are less likely to share their info when a program simply offers to make interactions easier, more efficient, or to deliver personalized recommendations. What they do value is when they receive exclusive access to sales, events, or products. Essentially, today’s customers are more willing share their data if they are given the VIP treatment.

The listening capabilities of a CX platform can help you to further narrow down what perks really drive participation in your loyalty programs.

Focus on Relationships, Not Memberships

Sure, customer satisfaction is a short-term win. After all, if a customer was able to purchase the product or service they were looking for, they might be more willing to become a loyalty program member. But why stop there? When you provide excellent brand interactions over and over again, you have a customer that will come back, buy more, and recommend you to others. That is the kind of customer you create when you focus on relationships and loyalty over merely satisfaction.

The key to going beyond “good” and creating excellent experiences is emotion. When InMoment studied unstructured customer data, we found that when discussing memorable experiences, most customers concentrated on the interactions they had with brand representatives and, even more importantly, the emotions they evoked. Ultimately, it’s not the 20% off coupons that inspire emotional experiences, it’s the meaningful human interactions that keep customers around in the long run.

With customer experience, you can go beyond collecting loyalty members and utilize emotion to create lasting impact.

Though loyalty marketing programs and customer experience both have similar goals, it is vital that marketers recognize customer experience goes beyond the membership/incentive mindset. When you focus on customer experience, you can enrich all areas of your business—including your loyalty program—by understanding your customers, evoking positive emotions, and fostering long-lasting relationships.

To learn more about what customers expect from their brand interactions, check out the 2018 CX Trends Report: What Brands Should Know About Creating Memorable Experiences!

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Written by Kristi Knight

Reading time 4 minutes

5 Ways to Break Down the Data Silos that Hurt Customer Experience

Do you have a data silo problem?

Do customers complain of having to explain everything about their business to sales, and then to customer success, and then again to customer support?
Is customer support hearing about the same issues, over and over again, that aren’t being addressed by product?

Those are just two of the most frequent symptoms of data silos. Here are some more, reported to us by our friends at Segment.

Inability to answer complex questions about your customer journey.
Inability to quantify the impact of a given campaign against down-funnel, often offline conversations (like Salesforce lead status updates).
Inability to affect targeting criteria in a given channel based on interactions that occurred in another (ie. you’re spamming users across channels when they’ve already converted or signaled their preferences in another.

What do all of these silo symptoms have in common? They all damage customer experience, and they all result from data not being shared between teams and departments.

Three main causes of data silos

Data silos are isolated islands where information sits, visible to just one or a few people. Usually, the cause of data silos isn’t some greedy information hog, unwilling to let anyone see his or her hoard of numbers. It’s nothing so Dickensian. Here are the main reasons they exist.

Structural

Businesses that have been around through multiple owners, leaders and ideologies typically have incompatible systems in place from various eras and incarnations. Older software or apps that haven’t been updated or replaced probably don’t play well with others. Whereas newer data collection and analysis programs have built-in capacities to share information with other apps, older systems don’t. Or, they don’t do it automatically. If no one is tasked with disseminating the information, it doesn’t get shared.

Social

Maybe teams aren’t rewarded for sharing, or required to share information. Or, maybe there is a data hoarding person or group who keep data to themselves to maintain a sense of power and control. But usually, it’s a case of ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ resistance to change. Having a ‘silo mentality’ in your business makes it difficult or impossible to quickly spot opportunities and take advantage of them, because when information isn’t shared, you can’t make fast, informed, data-driven decisions.

Vendor lock-in

Maybe it’s not you, it’s them. The software vendors. Yes, even software-as-a-service applications can effectively ‘trap’ businesses within their platforms by requiring heavy investments in special training, or they may lack native integrations or an open API. In either case, they make it difficult to switch information over to other apps.

Breaking down these data silos requires a lot of effort and commitment. Structural causes require an overhaul of all or most of your existing systems; social causes may take a company-wide initiative to improve company culture; and vendor lock-in-related causes are, by nature, tricky to remedy.

So before we get into how to break down data silos, let’s look at why it’s worth all of the time, effort, and investment.

What you stand to gain by breaking silos down

One of the biggest threats data silos pose to companies is blocking customer success. Customer success depends on everyone in the company being aligned behind the same data-informed vision of the target customer – their needs, wants, challenges and desired outcomes.

But that alignment depends entirely on sharing information across the entire organization, not just once, but continuously, to facilitate collaboration between sales, marketing, customer success and customer service (at minimum). When customer-facing departments run entirely separately from each other, it’s the customers who pay the price.

When customers run into trouble, they have to repeat themselves as they’re bounced around from agent to agent.

If a loyal customer was unhappy with the last order, s/he will feel pestered and aggravated when a clueless sales rep tries to upsell them.

Of course, it’s not only customers who suffer – nobody benefits from data silos! A 2016 brief from Forrester observed the high rates of “misaligned performance metrics, lack of clarity around lead scoring (and definitions)” and other misunderstandings between marketing and sales that leaves “sales ops in the middle to make sense of the chaos.”

Another Forrester statistic is “less than 1% of leads in B2B ever become customers,” which means businesses are wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work, salespeople are wasting time on leads that will never convert, and – when you have data silos, marketers might not even know what they’re doing wrong.

With some types of data, sharing is even more important because so many departments stand to benefit from having easy access to it. Voice-of-customer data, for example, is a must-have for marketing (for testimonials, ad/sales page/email copy, content ideas), sales (for upsells), and product (to optimize features).

The bottom line is: Breaking down data silos is an absolute requirement of creating the customer-centric culture customers want and companies need.

How to break those silos

“A customer-centric culture should be the North Star and guiding principle for tearing down the silos [between marketing, sales, and customer service]… Before joining Salesforce, I spent 12 years running global engineering and also serving as a [chief marketing officer]. Silo busting was how I spent most of my time. I realized that I had to try to align different areas of the business, and the only way to do that was to silo-bust.”

– Vala Afshar, chief digital strategist at Salesforce

First, diagnose what is causing your silo problem using the 5 Whys cause and effect analysis.

The idea is to find the root cause of the surface problem. The surface problem, for example, might be that marketing isn’t qualifying leads before passing them on to sales. The reason for that might be that marketing isn’t sure what the success indicators are for leads who convert. The reason for that might be because that data is stopped up – it’s kept by sales.

We’re already at the third ‘why’ question and we’ve just gotten to the middle problem of the data silo.

The answers to ‘why’ #4 and ‘why’ #5 will reveal the core cause that’s creating the silo in the first place.

Why use the 5 Whys? Because you might find that a data silo isn’t the root of the problem, or that the reason for the silo isn’t what you think it is. There may, in fact, be an underlying issue that runs deeper than investing in a new data gathering and analysis program can fix.

Second, get management buy-in.

Once you’re armed with the problems the data silo creates, as well as a thorough understanding of the underlying issues contributing to those problems, take your findings to management. You’ll need total buy-in from the top to address those deeper issues and find a data-busting solution that works perfectly for your company.

To get that buy-in, you’ve got to present a strong case that freely shared information will help each individual department, and the entire organization, essentially offering them a unified vision. In addition to bringing up current problems free-flowing information can fix, also consider how it can aid your company’s long-term goals and department objectives.

Third, align behind your North Star (the customer)

It’s not going to be easy to change long-standing habits in your organization, so to do it successfully, you’ve got to have whole-company alignment behind the real purpose of your proposed changes: The customer.

Your customers will tell you what impact your changes are really having. But, you need a metric to track, so everyone can see that breaking down silos (and all the work and training that go into it) are worth the effort.

We call this a “North Star metric,” like Net Promoter Score (NPS). When you see NPS scores rise, proving that customers are indeed happier (so happy they’re willing to recommend you to a friend or colleague), it’s proof positive that what you’re doing makes a difference.

Fourth, find the right tools.

Better tools lead to better collaboration, and what you’ll want to look for are data gathering and analysis tools that integrate with your CRM software (which will also solve the vendor lock-in problem, if that’s the source of your silo).

This is going to be your “single source of truth” database. Salesforce is a perfect example.

It’s key to make sure that data is shared with various functional systems of record so everyone has what they need at their fingertips. At Wootric, for example, we sync customer/prospect data from our product, Intercom (for Success) and HubSpot (for Marketing) to Salesforce – and from the Wootric survey platform, we integrate with Slack, Intercom, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

For us, this means:

The way we put NPS into Intercom so that if a customer reaches out about a conversation, someone can see the entire history of that customer.
You could have a different conversation with a promoter than someone who ‘dinged you’ the last time – having that context shifts the conversation.

Segment Product Manager Chris Sperandio says customers come to his company for better alignment through data.

The key is the desire to align all of their departments around a shared customer context. The way they achieve this is ensuring each department’s tools are running on a common data set. This way, they can run more cohesive campaigns and they can operationalize their insights and predictions.

Fifth: Invest in cross-functional training – together.

Once you have diagnosed your core problems, obtained management buy-in, and choose a metric that measures progress, and have the right tools – it’s time to bring everyone together for training.

Not only will everyone need training on how to use the new tools, they’ll also need training on how they can best work together to create better customer experiences through sharing information. Silo-busting is a multi-team effort, but when teams have traditionally been kept separate and sovereign, it can be a challenge to build bridges and relationships.

Try hosting a meeting with everyone to establish a shared understanding of each team’s goals, challenges and pain points.

Then, have everyone get together to find areas where insights and abilities from one person can help another person with their challenges and goals.

Finally, have everyone fill out a “communication builder” questionnaire that asks:

Basic contact information: phone/email/Slack etc.
What is their job title/function?
When and how do they prefer being contacted (ie. by phone before noon, or via email – but not available on weekends for immediate response).

This step sets up co-workers for success by setting expectations and letting everyone receive requests and information in the way that works best for them.

Alternately, you might consider creating a cross-functional “tiger team” who ‘owns’ the progress of the North Star metric (like NPS) and has a C-suite sponsor who helps them get things done.

Collaborative training is a good start, but will need to be nurtured over time as the human tendency is to fall back into familiar behavior patterns. To help break those patterns, you might even consider physically moving people so employees from different teams work next to each other, building relationships.

Measure and improve customer experience at scale.

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

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

Updated January 21, 2025

Reading time 9 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

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

9 Empathy Exercises that Help Product Teams Improve CX

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. For Product Managers looking to improve customer experience (CX), that definition translates to doing more than understanding the user’s pain points, but also looking at the emotional landscape of what it’s like to use the product – when it is working, and when it isn’t working.

Empathetic Product Managers ask themselves:

How does using the product make the customer feel?
How does the customer want to feel when using your product? What would be the best possible emotional outcome for them?
How do I ensure the product developers understand and take the customers’ needs into consideration in their process?

The answers to those questions affect every facet of business, from acquisition to retention. It’s how, through CX, you can generate rapid growth through word-of-mouth recommendations, and sustain your success with customers who never want to leave.

Tying Empathy into CX

Empathy is a soft skill, and while those are typically difficult to measure, the effects of empathetic product development can be seen in every CX metric: Customer satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Sinead Cochrane, Senior Product Researcher at Intercom, wrote “For product teams, empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support is often not considered ‘real work’. However, product teams that consistently keep customer needs in mind are able to maintain and evolve their products in ways that won’t negatively impact the user experience.”

For her, empathy for product departments means “When a customer tells you something is broken, you are able to imagine the impact it’s having on the job they’re trying to get done,” and, “you realize the emotional impact the problem is having on that person.”

But I think we can go further than just recognizing the emotional impact of problems. That’s scratching the surface of what having empathy for customers can mean for producing superior customer experience.

Because empathy shouldn’t be reduced to realizing customers feel bad when a product isn’t working for them. A whole new world opens up when you also consider how you can design your product, updates, and expansions to enhance positive emotions as well.

Here are the questions that lie at the heart of empathetic product management:

How can you get more emotionally in sync with your customers?
Which are the most important negative emotional outcomes to manage?
Which emotions should you seek to heighten (and how?)

To answer these questions, try these empathy building exercises.

Empathy Building Exercises for Product Managers and their Teams

Listen actively to discover underlying needs and emotional motivations

Often relegated to customer service and customer success departments, ‘active listening’ to find out why your customers use your product and what they really want to achieve is very important. You can’t get the depth and honesty of answers by just sending out a survey – this works much better if you do phone, Zoom or in-person interviews. In fact, Roman Pichler recommends product managers meet real users on a regular basis. You may find that your assumptions of why customers use your product aren’t accurate, or don’t tell nearly enough of the story.

“At first, our assumption was that they wanted to make more money. That often was true, but frequently we heard something different. Many simply wanted to maintain the business but run it more efficiently so they could have more free time (we heard about golfing on Fridays more than once). Others wanted to build a sustainable business they could pass on to their son or daughter.” – Jim Semick, Founder & Chief Strategist at ProductPlan

To get down to customers’ real motivations, ask open-ended questions beginning with “why” and “how.” Then make sure to record their answers in their own words (you can hand those assets to your copywriters for later use).

Use your own product

Empathy is often described as ‘putting yourself in someone else’s shoes’ – and there’s no better way to do this for a product manager than to actually use the product, just like any user would. You’ll empathize with users’ frustrations as you experience your own product’s shortcomings and hopefully find moments where it’s possible to create more delight.

But always keep in mind – you are not the average user. You’ll still need to listen to your users to get a complete picture of how they feel, and what problems they perceive as being severely aggravating.

Share verbatim comments

Someone, somewhere, is tracking customer experience metrics, sending out surveys, and collecting the answers. That someone might even be you. When reading users’ written responses, don’t just look for problems to solve and ignore the positive comments. Read them for emotion and see what conclusions you can draw about what people are feeling, and want to feel.

Pick a few relevant verbatim comments to bring to the rest of the product team. Reading these comments often helps engineers and designers feel the same joy or frustration as their users. This new emotional understanding will help you evangelize CX as a priority with everyone.

Mine your qualitative data and quantify customer sentiment

Those open-ended response answers are a goldmine for user research that can alert you to problems – and give you hints into the customer’s emotional state of mind. However, once you are getting more than a hundred comments a month, seeing the forest for the trees can be a difficult exercise. Qualitative feedback is notoriously tough to quantify, but it is now possible and easy to quantify sentiment with the help of machine learning.

AI-powered platforms, like InMoment CXInsight™, automatically sort your customer comments into themes while simultaneously assigning positive or negative sentiment. This provides you with a big picture understanding of how customers feel about your product and why. Categories of feedback vary by business sector and business model–payment processes & delivery for e-commerce, perhaps, while UX and usability may surface for SaaS products. Quantifying the sentiment of what your customers are talking about can help you track emotional trends over time. Presenting this kind of data alongside verbatim comments connects customer emotion with real business consequence.

Feedback categorized by theme with sentiment breakdown — Example of auto-categorized NPS comments with sentiment assigned in a dashboard. Source: Wootric

Set empathy KPIs

What gets measured gets done, and adding empathy into your product development work is no different. The KPIs for empathy may look a little different than your typical performance indicators, but the good news is: They’re not difficult to get. You’ll find key performance indicators like NPS, CES and CSAT are a good start, and comments in the open-ended questions can give you insight into the metric. Start identifying what kinds of ratings and qualitative answers correlate to genuinely happy customers – and frustrated customers likely to churn.

Chart out an empathy map

You’ve done your user journey, but even though it’s part of the buyer persona building process, you may not have done an empathy map.

What your user sees – on competitors’ websites, common visuals in their industries, maybe what they enjoy watching or reading
What your user says – how they measure success, what they say they want, what they say about your product
What your user hears – what their influencers are saying, not just about your product, but about their jobs and what constitutes success, what they enjoy, what they don’t like about their experiences with your competitors, etc.
What your users think and feel – worries, aspirations, what they really want, what really annoys them

Notice how the empathy map includes business/industry-specific observations, but also branches out into the user’s personal life and larger environment. People are not their jobs – or even their ‘jobs to be done.’ For true empathy, you have to look at the whole person.

This is a great activity to get other teams involved in – consider hosting a meeting with Customer Success, Sales, Marketing and Customer Service for a wider scope of insights.

Activities involving multiple teams help to build a shared understanding of your customers’ experiences that can strengthen the whole company.

Add happy moments to your Customer Journey Map

You’ve probably mapped out your customer/user journey, but you probably didn’t include this: Happy moments. See if you can take your old customer journey map and mark the points where positive, fun, delightful things happen. Can’t think of any? Then you have some serious CX work to do!

And of course, also note points where you’ve observed friction, difficulties, and problems, and address those in the order of biggest impact + easiest to implement.

Work in Customer Support for an afternoon

Whether that means answering the live chat questions, picking up the phone, or monitoring your product’s customer Slack channel, try out being the Customer Support agent for an afternoon to and put yourself on the front lines! There’s no better way to find problems than to let customers tell you exactly – and in great detail – what they are. And they’ll likely throw in how frustrated it makes them feel too.

Build a prototype to test your emotional hypotheses

By now, you probably have a few ideas on how you can improve the customer experience, and it might be time to test those theories. Create a prototype for a select group of qualified users to try (and react to). And, if possible, have them test the prototype in a testing facility that allows you to observe their reactions as they use your product.

If there is a Golden Rule for empathy, it’s a simple one: Forget your assumptions and be genuinely interested and curious about what people are feeling (not just what they’re doing) while using your product. Empathy is a learned skill that needs practice so don’t forget to try out these empathy exercises on a frequent basis for enhanced customer experience.

To quote Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Be the customer experience champion at your company. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Updated January 21, 2025

Reading time 8 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Customer Touchpoints: The More, the Better for Health Insurance Providers

Omnichannel touchpoints not only provide more customer data, but they encourage relationships and, therefore, brand loyalty. This is true for all industries, but research shows having multiple options for interaction can make all the difference for insurance providers in particular.

One of the most basic ingredients for successfully improving the customer experience is actually providing opportunities for interaction. It’s simple: You can have the most sophisticated analytics in the world, but if you have nothing to analyze, it will be impossible to unearth insights that will improve your customer experience.

A study of 2,000 health insurance customers found that “interaction options” is one of the three most important factors to customers when it came to choosing a health insurance provider. This finding is impressive on its own, but what’s even more surprising is that “interaction options” out-ranked “brand” in terms of differentiators.

Additionally, the study found that customers are even willing to pay more for additional interaction options. I found this to be both validating and shocking for a few reasons. First, it confirms a belief that we have at InMoment: you need to make it easy for your customers to interact with you whenever, wherever, and however they want.

Second, there has been a lot of talk recently that digital is taking over. While that may be true to a certain extent, this study found that in actuality, customers still want the choice between digital and traditional interaction options, because they prefer different touchpoints for different conversations. For example, customers said they generally prefer digital touchpoints for simple interactions like changing contact information, but they prefer a telephone call to address larger and more complex concerns.

Of course, providing all these touchpoints can get down-right expensive and it can be challenging to provide the same level of service across a variety of touchpoints.

This is a legitimate business concern, but in light of these recent findings, it is clear that having multiple methods of interaction is a differentiator for health insurance customers. Touchpoints can be costly, but failing to provide customers with the service they want is even more risky.

Healthcare is an incredibly personal industry and choosing a health insurance provider can be especially stressful for customers. Therefore, it’s even more important to make customers feel heard and cared for, while also allowing them to reach out in the way they feel most comfortable.

To learn more about what customers want from their customer experience, check out the 2018 CX Trends Report!

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Written by David Van Brocklin

Reading time 2 minutes

Multichannel Communications and the 24/7 Customer

In this piece, InMoment investigates the current state of play for brands in the multichannel communication sphere and explores how they can find the balance in their own CX approaches.

With a rise in social media communications, the goal posts of customer engagement have forever shifted, demanding a more instant and personal approach from brands. Traversing each channel of communication can be a minefield, with each one requiring its own style and speed of response. At the same time, customers are becoming increasingly savvy to alternate ways to reach a brand and this has changed the expectations of customer experience. In this piece, InMoment investigates the current state of play for brands in the multichannel communication sphere and explores how they can find the balance in their own CX approaches.

Whether it be responding to a customer complaint or a more general enquiry, the multichannel approach is bringing the consumer into ever closer contact with a business. As a result, brands need to evolve their CX approach to ensure they can continue to meet the expectations of customers who demand a 24/7 response – those businesses that do this will thrive. This means a CX programme needs to take into consideration bricks and mortar retailing, online operations, mobile interfaces, social platforms and beyond.
While each channel is distinct they should not be looked at as siloed avenues – with the technology now available, brands can build an open response model, allowing them to successfully bring their CX strategy into alignment with the multiple channels available for communication.

What is key for businesses is to invest in technology that enhances the customer experience. InMoment’s latest CX Trends Survey, launched in April this year, found that brands often overinvest in technology for the sake of it rather than looking at what will impact the relationship with the consumer. The survey found that the most valuable experiences that involve technology reflect a desire for convenience: self-checkout at a physical store and the ability to give feedback via a mobile device. The fact that customers are so eager to share feedback is golden for brands, since it gives them opportunities to listen and act.

If brands are implementing new technology, they must ensure that it provides value to the customer experience across all channels. One example of a brand using cutting-edge tech to do just that is IKEA. Using augmented reality, they provide customers with a high-tech solution to very practical challenges: virtually seeing what a specific paint colour will look like in context, and seeing how a piece of furniture will fit into a room — both in terms of size and aesthetics. The key to investing in flashy new technology is to ensure they align with your overall brand strategy and follow through to ensure they make a real impact on customers.

Businesses should also see the 24/7 consumer as an opportunity to create new found levels of engagement with their target audience. Brands need to embrace the multichannel approach and renovate any outdated CX models that don’t encompass the nuances of each platform. In the last few months we’ve seen dozens of retailers and hospitality businesses significantly downsize or collapse, such as Toys R Us, Maplin and Prezzo. We’ve seen the ease of purchasing via online retailers and price-competitive grocers being blamed, along with falling behind with vital store updates, however, what many brands are missing is the importance of nailing the customer experience, in a relevant way for all customers across every brand touchpoint.

There are clear pressures for brands, such as increasing operational costs and squeezed budgets, but this is where understanding what is important to customers is paramount. Businesses that create memorable, positive impressions are the ones that will prosper – those that deliver what they promise, consistently across all platforms, and really listen to their customers. Staff interaction cannot be overlooked as it has a huge impact – both good and bad – on the customer experience. Consumers want real connections with staff who are well-trained to educate and inform across all channels. Over 73% of customers reported in InMoment’s survey that staff interaction is key when creating positive experiences – and a further 61% said poor staff attitude, lack of knowledge and slow or unhelpful service contributed to a negative memorable experience. Brands should look for ways to reduce customer pain points, increase frequency of opportunities to delight, and measure the change, and this must happen wherever a customer interacts with a brand.

One of the key opportunities for brands is to implement always-on listening, plugging in CX feedback technology into all channels to ensure customer feedback is being consistently collected, analysed and acted upon. AI will be key, opening up barriers to communication and empowering CX professionals by arming them with relevant and timely data. Brands that embrace this technology, listen to customers consistently and – most importantly – make operational changes based on this data will keep the 24/7 customer on side.

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Written by Simon Fraser

Reading time 3 minutes

5 Sneaky Biases That May Affect Your Customer Insight Analysis

Data is the beating pulse of business, but customer data is more like DNA. Customer data, if we’re using it right, directs how we grow and what we develop. But what happens if that customer data becomes corrupted by our own bias?

We can’t grow or develop in the ways we need to.

But what is bias exactly? Where does it come from?

The most prevalent bias is, perhaps, confirmation bias – seeking out data that confirms our existing beliefs.

In an early study of confirmation bias, young children were asked what features in a sports ball are important to the quality of a player’s serve. Some said size, others said material, some dismissed color as a factor – but once they’d made up their minds, they failed to acknowledge evidence that was contrary to their theory – or explained away evidence that didn’t fit.

But what’s worse, especially for those of us using data to steer our businesses, is that confirmation bias caused them to not generate alternate theories unless someone asked them to. They missed exploring and finding other possibilities.

There are other types of bias too, including:

Algorithmic bias – When the data used to teach an AI machine learning system reflects the implicit values of the humans involved in collecting, selecting and using that data. You might remember the 2015 uproar around Google’s image recognition AI algorithm that auto-tagged photos of black people as gorillas? Yes, that happened. And in 2009, Nikon’s image recognition algorithms consistently asked Asian users if they were blinking.

Survivorship bias – When the data analyzed only comes from success stories.

Sample bias – When the population you collect data from doesn’t accurately reflect the population you’re trying to learn about.

Avoiding bias when gathering, analyzing and acting on data is impossible. Bias creeps in with assumptions, instincts, guesses, and ‘logical’ conclusions – and mostly, we don’t even know they exist until someone without those particular biases point them out.

But, while we can’t escape biases, we can try our best to account for them when we collect, analyze and interpret data.

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

How to fight bias in your data

In Forrester’s The illusion of insights recording, Forrester Vice President and Research Director Sri Sridharan makes three recommendations to reduce bias in data.

She says to “triangulate insight” by using multiple methods of arriving at an insight, and cross-validation. For example, pairing behavioral data with feedback from customer surveys to see if you arrive at the same or similar answers.

Her second piece of advice is to create a “self-correcting system of insights” that connects customer data with an effective action to create a closed loop of action, learning, and optimization. Essentially, this means testing the data by taking action and iterating based on how well you succeed in addressing the issue.

Tracking a ‘North Star’ metric like NPS or CSAT over time can be very helpful in confirming whether the changes you make are having the desired effect.

Sri’s third piece of advice is to “show your work to build trust” both internally and with customers. Your customers will be quick to correct you if your insights don’t hold true for them – and you have the bonus of showing them how hard you’re working to make sure they have what they need to succeed.

But there is also the potential for bias to happen before any of these fixes can be made – especially in Customer Discovery.

Bias in Customer Discovery, Before You’ve Even Gotten to the Data

Bias in whom you ask

Who you survey, interview or meet with can bias your results. This is called “sample bias” – but it can also turn into confirmation bias. Sample bias happens when some members of the intended population are less likely to be included than others. Think of all of the different segments of users you have – what would happen if you only surveyed one of those segments? You would get responses that don’t work equally well for all of your customers.

This can slide into confirmation bias if the population you select is more likely to give you the answers you want to hear.

And, there’s also the risk of “survivorship bias,” if the people you’re surveying are the customers who are still with you, rather than the users who have churned. Current users are much easier to collect data from, and while they can give you important insights, they can’t tell you why your churned customers left.

Bias in how you ask

How you frame questions can have a dramatic effect on the responses. In fact, by the wording you use in a survey, or even your tone of voice in a phone interview or facial expressions in an in-person interview, you can effectively steer the conversation to deliver exactly the answers you’re hoping to hear. Many of the words we use have positive or negative associations that cause people to react accordingly.

Biased question: How much do you like the color blue? (This presupposes they like the color blue at all)

Unbiased question: How does the color blue make you feel? (A much more neutral phrasing)

Or, if you aren’t specific enough about the information you want, you risk confusing your respondent and getting answers that aren’t at all helpful. Unless you have a professional market researcher on staff, you may want to stick with established questions like NPS and CSAT.

Bias in what you ask first – and last

The order of the questions you ask can also bias your results, and you’ll need to review your question order carefully to make sure the sequence doesn’t cause biased responses. Typically, you should ask general questions before specific ones, ask positive questions before negative ones, and ask questions about behavior before questions about attitude.

Bias in when you ask

Holidays and the summer months, when families often take their vacations, can be problematic for both response rates and sample bias. For example, if you send a survey during religious holidays, you’ll likely get different responses rates from different groups of people, who may or may not be taking that time off. Be aware of your timing, including if you’re sending surveys during deadline rushes, before or after holidays, or other significant patterns that may affect who responds and how they respond. To be on the safe side, don’t send your survey at the same time every year – send a few, at different times, to get the most accurate feedback.

Objective Data Leads to More Accurate, More Valuable Insight

Sherlock Holmes famously tells Dr. Watson that he never forms a theory before he gathers all of the facts. But he’s much better at disassociating himself from the results than most of us are (and he’s fictional). Bias has a way of seeping into our results, and how we view and react to our results. But, when we put bias-countering measures in place, like gathering data from different sources, using different types of data, and checking our work through a process of action and iteration, we can get to the truth in the end.

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Updated January 21, 2025

Reading time 6 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

3 Takeaways for Improving Restaurant Customer Experience

With restaurant customer experience advancing at what seems to be the speed of light, it is more important than ever to stay up-to-date with the latest best practices so you can differentiate your brand.

As a customer success manager at InMoment, I’m always looking for new ways to help my clients optimize their customer experience. Luckily, I hit the insights jackpot when I was able to attend the Marketing Executives Group (MEG) conference earlier this month!

As a part of this conference, my colleagues and other restaurant marketing professionals were able to listen in on some of the latest and greatest industry research, thought leadership, and best practices for the food services industry.

Here are my top three takeaways from the 2018 MEG conference that will help improve restaurant customer experience:

Food is more culturally relevant than ever.

One of the first sessions I attended was “Culture in the Digital Age” with author and food culture expert Eve Turow Paul of ETG Insights. This presentation discussed the millennial generation’s relationship with food and how it is influenced by social media. Millennials are especially invested in food, and by that I mean that they are spending more money on food than ever before. Yes, this is partially because they eat out, but they also care about the quality of food.

In the new age of social media, food has become identity and a part of self-branding. When millennials post pictures of their food online, they are trying to present a version of themselves that shows they are educated, well-traveled, and environmentally conscious. In short, the food they want to be seen consuming is food that helps them present an idealized version of themselves.

Off-premise dining is the new frontier.

Another session I attended, “New Dynamics of Off-Premise Dining” with Melissa Wilson and Donna Hood Crecca of Technomic Inc., discussed the incredible growth we’re seeing in off-premise dining. Here are just a few stats: Of the 519 billion dollars that restaurants make, off-premise restaurants account for 228 billion (44%) of those dollars. This huge percentage is understandable, especially considering that people are ordering delivery 28% more than they were just a year ago.

Food kits contribute to the off-premise trend, but the real game changer has been third-party delivery. This option is great for restaurants, but it also means that a few adjustments need to be made. Users blame the restaurant—not the third party—for negative experiences, meaning that restaurants need to take special care with takeaway packaging, creating dedicated systems for third-party pickup, and maintaining customer connection.

Employees MUST be empowered to solve problems.

I think we’ve all had an experience with a company where we have hit some sort of road block and the frontline employee who has been working with us says, “this is company policy; let me talk to my manager.” Turns out this is the worst possible thing to say according to Scott Stratten, President of Un-Marketing. His session “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing and Start Engaging,” addressed how you can build relationships with your target audience so they become loyal customers.

My favorite takeaway from this session is that your employees need to be able to make things right immediately; in other words they need to be empowered. Stratten suggested that today’s brands should attempt to improve the bottom line by improving the front line because branding isn’t about the logo, it’s about the guest’s last experience with you. If you want guest experiences to be positive so they create a positive perception of your brand, your employees need to be able to fix problems immediately wherever they are. This ensures that a customer leaves validated, knowing that their issue was important to your brand.

Hopefully these takeaways are as inspiring to you as they are to me. With restaurant customer experience advancing at what seems to be the speed of light, it is more important than ever to stay up-to-date with the latest best practices so you can differentiate your brand.

For more tips, check out this InMoment case study that highlights how our client, Pizza Hut, leverages employee stories to improve their guest experience!

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Written by Chaylynn Laws

Reading time 3 minutes

CX Trends: The Human Factor

Despite apocalyptic talk that artificial intelligence will replace people at some time in the not-too-distant future, InMoment’s annual US CX Trends report revealed that the human factor continues to be the primary force in making or breaking the customer experience. Consumers value genuine connections with staff who are well-trained to care, educate and inform, whether in-store, online, or on the phone.

More than six out of ten (65%) of US consumers report that “staff interaction” highly influenced their decision to buy more products from a brand, while another 65% reported that access to educators and experts is highly influential.

In researching factors that contributed to positive, memorable experiences, we found good alignment between what consumers prioritize and what brands felt was most important to their customers. Consumers’ top 5 contributors to positive experiences were staff interaction, access to experts/educators, loyalty treated differently, trial / testing options, and exclusive products/services. Similarly, brands ranked their top five as staff interaction, loyalty treated differently, customization options, exclusive products/services, and access to experts/educators.

While human interaction is key to positive experiences, it’s also the top factor in poor experiences. And while brands recognize this fact, they significantly underestimate the real damage employees can do to the relationship with customers—and to the bottom line.

Almost three-fourths (74%) of consumers report that poor staff interactions (due to negative attitudes, lack of knowledge, or other reasons) were the key contributor to the type of bad experiences that they remember. By comparison, only 29% of brands reported the same. This shopping 45% gap in understanding was the biggest disconnect in the study.

With human interactions so clearly influential in customer relationships, brands must ensure that employees who work directly with customers can make the kind of emotional connection that reinforces positive, memorable experiences. While this can be challenging, especially in industries with high, front-line turnover rates, the stakes are too high to ignore.

So what else should brands so to ensure positive experience? In addition to their own staff, brands can leverage outside experts to boost the experience. We’ve seen this work well for brands that partner with both professional “experts” and respected peer voices—particularly on social platforms. With more customers than ever crowdsourcing their buying decisions, it makes sense to invest in authentic relationships with others who can speak on your brand’s behalf.

Outside of human interaction, nothing makes an experience more memorable than ensuring your customers feel special. Loyalty perks were mentioned in the top five positive experience influencers for both brands and consumers, so leveraging a loyalty program can be a major differentiator. However, our research also indicated that not all perks are equal. It’s important to do the proper work of understanding what benefits truly deliver value that enhances the relationship. Finally, consumers also value the ability to try new products and services before they purchase. This makes an impact because it both allows them to feel special, and demonstrates a measure of trust.

In a world so focused on technology, it can be easy to underestimate the impact of human interaction. Given these findings, however, it’s clear that if brands should invest in hiring, training, and technology that supports their human talent delivering the most positive, memorable experiences possible.

To learn more about the latest findings in customer experience, download our 2018 CX Trends Report!

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Reading time 2 minutes

Build vs Buy Customer Feedback Software: Making the Best Decision for a Survey Tool

Should enterprises build their own customer feedback software? After all, they’ve got the engineering talent and resources to take it on.

If you’ve got the resources to do it, creating such tools can be tempting, but more often than not, these solutions are trouble to build and maintain.

Why Companies Choose to DIY

Forget “to be or not to be”.

For businesses facing software decisions, it comes down to “build vs buy”. It’s always a balance between finding immediate solutions to problems and considering long-term growth.

Here are a couple of the tempting advantages of building software solutions for yourself:

“Anyway you want it, that’s the way you need it” – Journey

When you build something for yourself, it will solve all of your problems in exactly the way you wish. The dashboard will look exactly how you want it to look. The functions will pull from exactly the data you want it to pull from. If your business has specialized needs, a custom solution is functionally ideal.

Guaranteed compatibility with everything you already use

Your company has a suite of software that it’s already using. When the data in one software can’t be read by your system of record, people end up typing notes in manually, or other time-consuming methods to get important information recorded for everyone else in the organization. Building software for yourself means you can guarantee compatibility with everything you already use, and if you think ahead enough, compatibility with software you intend to acquire.

Unfortunately, these benefits will only bring value if you can spread out the significant cost of building custom software (time, energy, and resources) over a large number of clients and your engineers’ time isn’t better spent on other projects. Let’s face it, a customer feedback solution for Customer Success/ Customer Support is unlikely to be a priority for your product team.

Building your own software is expensive and getting a high enough ROI on this kind of project is difficult. Add in the ongoing costs associated with maintaining what you’ve built and buying a solution becomes very appealing.

Why You Should Buy Customer Feedback Software

Besides being incredibly labor and resource intensive, trying to build a solution requires months and months of brainstorming, planning, and coding. If the in-house solution isn’t properly and thoroughly planned out, with input from multiple functional teams, this can actually create more headaches and manual processes in the long term. Even worse, if the tool does not add value to the employees that it was built for, it could go unused.

When it comes to surveying your customer base, experts have already thought out a vast number of details, building standard settings and customizable options based on best practices. There is a reason why customer feedback is a whole industry, and that is because rigorous methodology is paramount to actionable insight.

Get the ebook, The Net Promoter Score Software Buyer’s Guide.

8 essential questions to find the perfect technology for your organization

Customer feedback software creators like Wootric have developed and iterated a variety of features to make starting and running a robust feedback program convenient and valuable. These tools automate gathering feedback and surfacing insight, which can be sent out for action. Buying customer feedback software gets both immediate and long-term value out of a customer feedback program:

Automated Sampling

If you’ve ever gone through the trouble of listing out, segmenting, and randomly sampling your users/customers, you know how tedious this task can be.

Multi-channel survey solutions – that reach your customers via email, in web products, and via text – help you automatically survey the appropriate random sample to capture different segments of your customer base. You can get feedback from both decision-makers who do not log-in to the platform very often via email surveys, and feedback from daily end-users via in-app surveys.

Wootric’s standard settings allow you to survey your customers with two different methods. You can keep the flow of feedback constant and random, avoiding various biases that may sneak in if you are not aware of them. This method gives you a daily pulse of feedback, usually Net Promoter Score (NPS), which provides a good sense of user sentiment on any given day, and can show you trends over time.

You can also send surveys based on completion of different events. For example, you may want to send out a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey after a support ticket is closed, or trigger a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey after a customer completes onboarding. Implementing these three micro-surveys at various customer journey touchpoints will get you a holistic “Trifecta view” of your accounts.

With both of these methods, you have the power to change the time frame dictating eligibility to take a survey and what percentage of users/visitors we sample, including the option to survey less than 1% of the customer base, if necessary.

Automated Safe Guard: Intelligent Throttle

It’s always important to have safety features. Customers are already inundated with information every day. You don’t want to add to that annoyance by sending the same survey to them over and over again in a short period of time.

Avoiding survey fatigue requires having separate controls for a slew of different situations that enterprise feedback software companies have thought out and prepared for. These include control over how often any individual will see a survey and how often individuals can respond to the same question.

For example, after one of your customers takes an in-app survey, that customer will not be shown another survey for another 90 days. You can change the number of days between surveys to suit your needs. You also have control over the number of days between surveys for people who decline your surveys.

All of these settings can be manipulated for each of the survey delivery channels that Wootric provides, as well as for each type of survey (i.e. NPS, CSAT, or CES) you choose to send. For Voice of the Customer programs using multiple delivery channels, Wootric has cross-channel safety features so customers don’t feel overwhelmed by your surveys popping up everywhere they turn.

If you decide to base your surveys off a triggering event, our survey throttle prevents customers from being bombarded with the same satisfaction survey in a short amount of time. While it is standard to have this throttle on, this can be overridden if you want every single triggering incident to fire off a new survey.

Auto-tagging and Segmentation for Insight

A Voice of the Customer feedback program doesn’t stop at just gathering feedback. The key to success is in the insight and action that happens after you’ve gathered customer feedback. If your engineers build a way to gather feedback but that data ends up sitting in a silo, unorganized, then you will never realize any value.

Tagging and segmentation features in enterprise customer feedback solutions aim to make sorting and analyzing survey responses easy and insightful.

Different customer segments will have different needs and therefore different feedback. The segmentation feature in software platforms like Wootric enables you to analyze customer experience KPIs like Net Promoter Score by customer properties. You can pass various properties, like geographic region, or persona, to drill down to specific segments and understand what’s important to your different types of customers.

Tagging is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to dealing with qualitative feedback. Frequency analysis lifts trending topics out of customer comments, and various teams can find relevant feedback with a single click.

For example, a product team can view all comments under a feature request tag and prioritize the most frequently requested ones from the highest-value customers.

Tagging can be done manually for companies receiving smaller quantities of responses. For companies overwhelmed with feedback, expertly built tools like Wootric can save you time and effort.

Check out our guide to auto-tagging for more benefits and ideas on how to start.

Integrations & Webhooks: Break Down Data Silos & Trigger Workflows

With native integrations and webhooks, you can achieve some of the same benefits of building your own software, i.e. automated workflows among platforms and a consolidated overview of important account information.

Switching back and forth between platforms disrupts workflow. With that in mind, Wootric has built a host of native integrations such as Slack, Salesforce, Gainsight, and Hubspot, to get customer feedback into the hands of those who can act on it like Customer Success, Product, Marketing & Sales. For other apps, Wootric can connect via incoming and outbound webhooks or Zapier.

This means you can push Wootric’s data out onto the platform of your choosing, and Wootric can listen for instructions to fire a survey based on events from whatever app you choose. The possibilities for data exchange are endless. Best of all, this sharing happens in real-time, so your information will always be up-to-date.

Learn all about use cases for connecting platforms with webhooks here.

Spend Your Time Acting on Insight Immediately

When it comes to build versus buy, there is great peace of mind that comes with buying an enterprise feedback management platform. You’ll have experts guide you through the set-up, listening to your company’s specific needs. You can get started immediately, reaping the rewards of a stellar customer feedback program now, including higher customer retention, happiness, and company growth.

Learn more about Wootric’s enterprise features or book a demo.

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Reading time 7 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Customer Success Analyst: When to Hire Someone Dedicated to the Data

The Customer Success Analyst has evolved to be the go-to person for all the data – or as Marketo put it in their Linkedin job ad, “the primary deliverable of the Customer Success Decision Analyst is to convert our Customer Success operation at Marketo into a highly data-driven business where we can measure, analyze and optimize every aspect of our engagement with our customers.”

This includes data like:

Feature usage patterns
Maturity scores
NPS results
Voice of customer qualitative feedback
Customer journey mapping
Customer experience metrics
Capacity models

Among all of the hats that CSM’s wear, the number-crunching, data-heavy, quantitative analyst hat is one of the most time-consuming. But because of the data-savviness this role demands, CS analysts also hold the keys to unlocking incredible potential when your business is scaling up.

The CS analyst role isn’t *just* about collecting data for dashboards and reports (and basing recommendations on that data) though. It complements the Success Operations role, which builds new tools and processes to scale CSM’s everyday activities. As the person navigating multiple platforms for data on a day-to-day business, CS Analysts know how information flows and who needs what information.

For one of Wootric’s customers, Chorus.ai, CS Analysts also take ownership of the technical onboarding process for new or upgrading customers, ensuring “a smooth implementation, including initial and ongoing training for customers.”

It’s a prime position from which to watch for opportunities to make big impacts on the success of customers – and the success of the company. That’s the subtextual expectation: By being in charge of the data, the CS Analyst knows how to use it to find untapped value.

What does a CS Analyst need to know?

Experience working with large amounts of data (SQL, Python or R) and with survey and analysis tools (Wootric, Tableau, etc.) are must-haves, but the most important qualification is having taken that data and used it to produce actionable insights.

Analysts are data story-tellers. They work with the numbers and provide context for them, creating reports to recommend strategic options and solutions. A listing for a CS Analyst position at Salesforce described one of the responsibilities as “assist in developing and delivering presentations for senior executives”, which requires strong public speaking and presentation skills.

If a company struggles with data silos, CS Analysts must bridge the gap between teams. Not only must analysts overcome the technical issues of compatibility, but they need to possess strong internal communication skills to overcome any organizational walls that may be contributing to the data isolation.

While CS Analysts own the quantitative facet of Success, a customer-centric mindset and empathy for the humans behind the numbers distinguish a great analyst from a good one. These soft skills help analysts frame their analysis to produce long-term, customer-centric solutions that support CSMs to retain customers.

What does this role look like in real life?

For some companies, the CS Analyst position can be a foot-in-the-door to Customer Success.

Anthony Enrico, VP of Customer Success at Emailage, created the Analyst position because his “CSMs were being asked to spend enormous amounts of time compiling reports and the opportunity cost of spending time deepening relationships and loyalty with customers was too great.” As a leader within the organization, Anthony was also doing a lot of work with these reports, when his time was clearly better spent working on strategy, escalations with his CSMs, and focusing on new business opportunities with the company.

So Anthony hired Bryan Mehrmann, now a CSM at Emailage. Bryan was originally brought on as the first CS Analyst to support the CSM team. Bryan compiled and sent out daily reports on customer usage trends to identify and correct anomalies as early as possible. He took detailed revenue projection reports and distilled them for the C-suite for their weekly use. Bryan took on more responsibilities as time went on.

Working together, Anthony and Bryan shaped the role as it is today. As for how the position fits into the CS team, Analysts can be promoted to full CSMs after they’ve achieved a comprehensive understanding of the product, metric drivers, and relationships with Emailage’s customers.

On the other hand, CSMs may choose to specialize in VoC data analysis like Customer Success Analyst Tim Dressel at Qualer. For him, there’s the usual collection and analysis of customer data in spreadsheets, but also a lot of room for innovation and collaboration. If he sees a red flag in the metrics, he leads investigations into those customer issues, working with his cross-functional team (and collaborating, at times, with Qualer’s Head of Technology) to make sure customers’ needs make it into the software they develop.

How do you know if you need a Customer Success Analyst on your team?

Customer Success Managers are often being pulled in five different directions at once, and when that happens, they sacrifice time on one task for another. Not only does Customer Success provides data and insight crucial to their own day-to-day, but they are the go-to team for reports for the C-suite.

Customer Success needs data. Data is at its core. So if your Customer Success team doesn’t have time to live and breathe data, you may be at the tipping point to bring in an analyst who can parse the numbers for you. This is especially important for scaling processes when anecdotal experiences have to give way to metrics.

For some companies, bringing on an Analyst to Customer Success may happen by incorporating a company-wide business analyst into the team and transitioning them into a full-time Success Analyst. Depending on the company, Customer Success may not need an Analyst until their team is four or five CSMs.

The most common theme among companies looking to hire a CS Analyst is major growth.

For example, a Wootric customer that recently started trading publicly, DocuSign, decided to add the Customer Success Analyst position as they accelerated their growth.

Analysts (& their data) are a CSM’s best friend

For Customer Success, the best way to prove value, whether it’s to senior management or to a customer, is with numbers and context. Having a role dedicated to creating robust reports to highlight value and propose inventive, data-backed solutions is an excellent way to help your current CSMs be the best that they can be at scale.

Automatically send customer feedback to Salesforce, Gainsight and Slack for quick action. Learn about InMoment’s integrations.

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Reading time 5 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

3 Ways to Apply Artificial Intelligence to Improve Your Customer Experience

There’s more need—and competition—than ever to deliver meaningful and powerful customer experiences. Fortunately, technology like artificial intelligence is helping bridge the gap, creating more value for both companies and customers, and allowing brands the opportunity to truly differentiate on customer experience.

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. From Google’s Arts & Culture App—which uses facial recognition technology to match selfies to thousands of artworks—to Pizza Hut’s plans for driverless pizza delivery.

The application of Artificial Intelligence to improve the customer experience is on the rise. In fact, this year the Consumer Electronic Show featured its first ever Artificial Intelligence Marketplace to showcase the latest innovations designed to perform human tasks. Products ranged from big data analytics to speech recognition to advanced decision-making to predictive technology. Many of these solutions are already being leveraged by great companies to add a magic touch to their services.

Are you taking advantage? If not, here are three ways you can apply Artificial Intelligence to improve your customer experience.

1. Automate Simple Customer Interactions

There’s nothing less efficient than bogging down highly-skilled, highly-paid employees with basic tasks. Emerging technology in artificial intelligence can automate simple interactions, allowing your people to focus on more complex and nuanced customer interactions. Gartner predicts that 95 percent of customer interactions will be driven by Artificial Intelligence by 2025, leveraging chatbots and mobile messaging to complete simple tasks (e.g., the reminder call from your doctor’s office or paying your tab using Ziosk, a pay-at-the-table tablet for restaurants).

Recently, Kroger announced its new Kroger Edge technology, which, among other things, will enable the grocer to instantly change prices and activate promotions on digital displays, freeing up employees who would otherwise change prices by hand. This sort of automation can deliver a more a consistent experience and a huge financial impact according to Juniper Research, who estimates cost savings of more than $8 billion annually by 2022, up from $20 million in 2017.

2. Augment Your Service Employees

Another powerful application of AI is within your own organization. By leveraging solutions that enable you to proactively listen to the voice of the customer and engage on an emotional level, customer experiences will shift from mundane to exceptional.

Recently, TD Bank acquired artificial intelligence startup, Layer 6. While it’s still uncertain exactly how the technology will be applied, Michael Rhodes, group head of innovation, technology, and shared services for TD Bank said the company would be able to do things such as detect spending patterns that indicate a customer may be looking to purchase a home, and then offer that customer a mortgage. This type of intelligence enables you to be proactive, engaging, and in-tune with your customers’ needs.

3. Enrich the Data You Already Have

Finally, you can take all the data you have, such as customer feedback and net promoter score, and put it to new use. As Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, notes, “There are a lot of places where AI simply lets companies use their data better, and AI usage is largely invisible to the customer. Retail sites, for instance, can observe the products people are viewing, and use that data to begin suggesting other, more relevant products to them than was previously possible.” Recently, in addition to making targeted content suggestions, Netflix began tailoring the “cover art” associated with a recommended movie or TV show, based on the user’s viewing history.

For example: the image displayed for a romantic comedy (I’m partial to The Truth About Cats and Dogs), will either play to the “romance” or the “comedy” of the film. Or, it may feature the image of an actor who starred in other movies you’ve watched. For what it’s worth, Stranger Things has nine different cover art options (check to see which one appears on your stream!).

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Written by Shayli Lones

Reading time 3 minutes

Three CX Basics Retailers Should Revisit

To say that the retail landscape is changing would be a complete and utter understatement. It seems like you can’t turn on the news or scroll through your smartphone without spotting another bankruptcy, downsizing, or complete shutdown of a brand that previously seemed untouchable.

Where some may see these shifts as intimidating, I think that they also present brands with an opportunity to step back and reanalyze their organization, especially when it comes to customer experience.

Customer experience is a key differentiator for all industries, but especially for retail. Our recent Retail Trends report found that positive interactions with staff increased customer satisfaction by 33% across industries and by a whopping 73% in the fashion industry. Because satisfied customers become loyal customers, emphasizing your CX efforts can really make a difference in your bottom line.

Whether you are relatively new to customer experience, or if you’ve had a program for a while, it’s important to make sure that you are covering all your bases with your customer experience program. I’ve put together a list of three CX basics that you can consider (or revisit) in order to make sure your customer experience is keeping you ahead of the game.

Efficiency

We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money,” and it’s true (especially in the checkout line)! Everyone has been in a situation where they are in a hurry and need to pick up an item last minute, only to be greeted with one open register and a seemingly never ending line. That is a guaranteed recipe for a negative experience that may even result in a customer abandoning their items and heading out the door.

With this in mind, it is incredibly important to keep wait times to a minimal. The latest CX technology can deploy data science to calculate when you have historically had the highest traffic, so you can schedule more employees accordingly. This tech can also leverage unstructured comments to get more specific feedback on your checkout process.

Convenience

For superior customer experience, you also need to be aware of how easy it is for customers to interact with your brand at every touchpoint. Convenience goes beyond the location of a physical store and self checkout stations; today, user experience is under the convenience umbrella as well. From the moment a customer enters your site or opens your app, it should be simple and easy for them to find a product, place it in their cart, and checkout.

If you are curious as to the convenience of your user experience, the simplest way to find out more is just to ask! Many web retailers have deployed intercept surveys in the past, but you want to be careful about how you use these. Make sure intercept questions aren’t one-size-fits-all and are relevant to a customer’s specific journey.

Friendly, Knowledgeable Service

If you’re looking to make a positive impression on your customers, your people are still your best weapon. This can be surprising seeing as we live in a world where automation is becoming the norm and in person interactions are becoming more rare, but retail employees still make a difference to customers. When you’re looking for new shoes, getting a second opinion or informed suggestion from a knowledgeable employee can make your day.

With this in mind, it is more important than ever to invest in your employees. You can hold frequent customer-centric or new product trainings to keep those on the front line informed. This enables them to provide consistent experiences and answer customer questions with ease and authority.

With so much change going on in the retail industry, it’s important to go back to the basics of your customer experience and make sure that you are proving the sort of interactions that will set your brand apart in the best way.

For more information on the current retail landscape, check out InMoment’s “2017 Retail Trends Report!”

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Written by Brock Stuart

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