The Ultimate Guide to Google My Business Posts

Google Posts can supercharge your customer engagement on your Google Profile, drive conversions, and even boost your SEO efforts. Learn everything from types and benefits to best practices and examples in this comprehensive guide.
Woman in an office looking at a tablet.

Google Posts are an invaluable tool for businesses to communicate updates, offers, and events directly to their audience. This guide will cover everything you need to know to make the most of them.

What Are Google Posts?

Google Posts are short updates published on Google My Business (GMB) profiles. These posts appear on your business listing, providing a direct channel to communicate updates, promotions, and events.

Types of Google My Business Posts

There are three primary types of Google Posts you should familiarize yourself with. Each type offers specific details about your business to encourage engagement and drive actions, such as purchases or visits to your location.

Offers: Organically promote discounts or special offers directly on your Google Business Profile. Offers appear near the top of the Business Profile on Google Search and Maps, as well as in the “Updates” tab with all other posts.

Updates: Provide general information about your business. Use this post type to share news, announcements, or updates that give potential customers more opportunities to learn about your brand.

Events: Share details of upcoming events to increase registrations and drive foot traffic. Events that meet specific criteria may also appear on the “Overview” tab of your Business Profile, making them more visible to customers.

Why Are Google Posts Important?

When shoppers browse online and land on your Google Profile, they look to understand if your business offers what they are searching for. Leveraging Google Posts to share business updates, events, and promotions would inform potential customers and allow them to make better decisions about whether they should visit your location. 

Google Posts boost engagement by fostering a direct connection with your audience. When integrated with other local SEO strategies, they can enhance your brand visibility and drive higher conversions, making them a powerful tool for local marketing success.

What Are the Benefits of Google My Business Posts?

Incorporating Google Posts into your listings management can significantly enhance brand equity and visibility as well as improve customer acquisition. Here are a few benefits to consider when evaluating if Google Posts are worth your time and effort:

Enhance your local marketing strategy: Google Posts can help strengthen your local presence, making it easier to attract nearby customers. By sharing information about your business, you keep your Google Profile fresh and complete, optimizing engagement and driving more conversions.

Increase engagement: Google Posts enable you to build direct connections with your audience. Using photos, clear calls-to-action, and timely updates demonstrates to shoppers that your business meets their needs and encourages meaningful interactions with your brand.

Decrease your ad spend: Marketing teams invest heavily in promoting their business and offerings. Highlighting offers, discounts, and events on your Google Profile creates an effective inbound channel strategy for generating organic traffic and engagement, reducing the need for expensive paid advertising.

By leveraging Google Posts to enhance local marketing strategy, foster customer engagement, and drive organic traffic, you can amplify your business’s impact while reducing paid promotion.

Do Google My Business Posts Help SEO?

Google Posts indirectly impact your local SEO performance by supplementing your Google Business Profile with additional information and enhancing its relevance. Regularly updating your Google Profile with posts ensures it stays fresh and complete, which signals to Google that your business is active and engaged with its audience. 

These posts also help you share timely updates, offers, and events, which can drive more clicks and interactions with your profile. The increased activity and engagement not only attract local customers but can also contribute to increased brand visibility. 

It’s important to remember that Google Posts alone would not help your brand rank in the local pack. To optimize your search performance, you need to focus on your overall local SEO strategy – invest in listing management and improve your online reputation.

How to Post in Google My Business?

There are two ways to publish a Google Post on your Google Profile. You can manually do that for each location by logging into your GMB profile. To do that follow the steps below:

  1. Log into your Google My Business account.
  2. Select “Add Update.”
  3. Choose the type of post you want to create.
  4. In the dialog box, fill in the details.
  5. Publish!

While this approach may work well for single-location brands, organizations with multiple locations often struggle to scale their efforts. If you are a multi-location brand, implementing a reputation management solution that offers listings management, including Google Posts, would help you create and publish posts at scale, while consolidating your daily operations into one platform.

See how easy it is to publish Google posts from the InMoment platform by taking a tour of the platform here!

What Are the Google Posts Dimensions?

All types of Google Posts allow a description of up to 1,500 characters. Use this space thoughtfully to craft engaging content that highlights the most important information while inspiring readers to act.

For images, prioritize high-quality visuals that are clear, well-lit, and professionally composed. Avoid significant alterations or excessive use of filters to ensure your images look authentic and appealing.

The recommended Google My Business post image size is:

Default Size: 720x 540pixels (4:3 aspect ratio)

Inches: 12.5 x 9.38 inches (width x height) at 96 DPI

Minimum Size: 480x 270 pixels

Maximum Size: 2120x 1192 pixels

Format: JPG or PNG up to 5MB

Google Business Posts Best Practices

Avoid phone numbers in descriptions: Including a phone number in your post description may result in rejection. Ensure this information is listed in the appropriate section of your Google Profile. You can attach a “Call now” button to your post that uses your verified Business Profile phone number.

Focus on quality: Make sure your posts are free of misspellings, gimmicky symbols, or meaningless content. Avoid anything that appears automated or overly distracting. While it may be tempting to use all 1,500 characters in your post description, focus on the primary goal of your post and highlight the most important details in an engaging way that resonates with your audience.

Make them actionable: Always include a call-to-action in your Google Posts, along with a link to a landing page that aligns with the next step in your buyer’s journey. A strong CTA can drive clicks, bookings, conversions, and in-person visits to your business.

Use high-quality images: Adding visuals to your Google Posts makes them more eye-catching and increases engagement. Use high-quality images that align with your brand, and avoid low-resolution visuals that fail to represent your promotions effectively.

Best time to post on Google My Business: As a general rule, avoid posting on major holidays or during very early or late hours. Depending on the type of post, consider the recommended times and days to publish to maximize engagement on your Google My Business profile.

  • Business Updates
    • Best time to post: 8 am – 10 am
    • Recommended days: Weekdays
    • Worst time to post: Before 7 am, after 9 pm, major holidays
  • Offers
    • Best time to post: 2 pm – 4 pm
    • Recommended days: Thursday and Friday
    • Worst time to post: Before 7 am, after 9 pm, major holidays
  • Events
    • Best time to post: 3 pm – 5pm
    • Recommended days: Midweek
    • Worst time to post: Before 7 am, after 9 pm, major holidays

Examples of Google My Business Posts

Now that we’ve covered the basics of publishing Google Posts on your Google My Business profile, let’s explore a few examples to inspire your strategy.

Good Examples Google My Business Posts 

A good example demonstrates a well-crafted Google Post that effectively engages its audience.

A Google My Business Post for a yoga studio featuring a woman and a dog.

It features a high-quality, visually appealing image that aligns with the content, capturing attention instantly. The message is concise, clear, and focused, highlighting a 30-day trial for yoga classes without requiring a membership commitment. Additionally, it includes a compelling call-to-action (CTA) that encourages participation. 

By incorporating a deadline, the post creates a sense of urgency, motivating potential customers to act. This post was also published on the Google Profile at the start of the offer, ensuring timeliness and relevance.

Poor Examples of Google My Business Posts

Now, let’s examine a Google Post that wasn’t as thoughtfully constructed as the previous example. What’s the first thing you notice? It’s missing an image! Without a visual element, the post fails to grab attention. 

Google My Business Post with markups highlighting errors.

Looking closer, you’ll see that the workshop’s listed start time doesn’t match the title and description, creating confusion for the reader. Additionally, the event description could be clearer and more concise, making it easier for users to quickly understand the post’s purpose and take action.

Can Google My Business Posts Get Rejected?

Yes, Google My Business Posts can be rejected if they fail to comply with Google’s content policies. To avoid rejections, ensure you follow best practices when creating your posts. Below are some common reasons for rejection:

Low-quality media: Posts featuring poor-quality visuals, such as blurry or pixelated images, may be removed. Per Google’s policy, removals based on media quality cannot be appealed.

Prohibited or restricted content: Posts containing irrelevant or misleading information, such as off-topic content, fabricated experiences, or repetitive and unclear language (e.g., random characters), are likely to be rejected. Additionally, links leading to suspicious or untrustworthy websites are prohibited.

Phone stuffing: Google does not allow phone numbers to appear within post content to prevent abuse. Ensure contact information is provided only in the designated sections of your profile.

By adhering to these guidelines, you can reduce the chances of your posts being rejected and maintain a professional presence on Google My Business.

Google My Business Posting Software

Incorporating Google Posts into your online reputation management strategy and listings management activities is worth your time. However, manually publishing posts for multiple locations can be overwhelming. Implementing a solution that enables you to create and publish Google Posts in bulk can save time while unlocking the full benefits of this feature.

But how do you choose the right Google My Business posting software? Consider these key factors when evaluating your options:

Align with reputation management goals: Ensure the tool supports your broader reputation management strategy by helping you build and maintain a strong online presence that attracts and retains customers.

Listings management capabilities: Select a local listing management software that simplifies managing multiple locations, ensuring your profiles are consistent and up-to-date across all platforms, and allowing you to publish Google Posts in bulk.

Scalability: Opt for an all-in-one platform that streamlines operations across locations and adapts as your business expands. This approach enables you to monitor results from a centralized dashboard, improving your strategy and results.

Ease of use: Opt for software with an intuitive interface that lets you start quickly without a steep learning curve. This not only saves time when adopting a new tool but also enables your team to manage Google My Business profiles more effectively.

Access to support: Look for platforms that provide reliable customer support, offering prompt assistance and access to tips and best practices to help you succeed in the long term.

With the right software, you can simplify Google Posts publishing, enhance engagement, and focus on growing your business by maintaining a positive reputation and boosting your brand’s visibility in search results.

Take Your Local Listing Management to the Next Level with InMoment

Partner with InMoment to build a reputation management strategy that turns online searches into location visits. Our reputation management software allows you to optimize the performance of your business listings and increase search visibility and engagement on your Google Profile.

We make it easy for multi-location brands to create and manage Google Posts while providing them with a centralized place to streamline their listings and reputation management efforts and improve results in less time than other vendors. 

Schedule a strategy session with our reputation management experts to learn how we can help you build a brand that attracts customers! 

User Feedback for SaaS: Best Practices & Tools for Business Success

Collecting user feedback for SaaS businesses helps improve products and customer experiences. A comprehensive feedback tool can capture the user's voice and analyze key metrics to help deliver exceptional customer service.

Customer experience (CX) is crucial to SaaS business success. Companies that focus on CX initiatives witness an 80% increase in revenue, highlighting the value of user feedback. With intense competition and changing customer preferences, businesses must better understand their users to stay ahead. Collecting user feedback for SaaS companies is a powerful step in this direction.

Why is User Feedback Important for SaaS Companies?

User feedback helps you refine your product to meet customer needs, resulting in increased satisfaction. Here are a few reasons why collecting customer feedback is important:

  1. It helps you build and optimize products. Your SaaS product should deliver consistent value to customers. It should address their unique pain points and help them achieve their goals. 

    User feedback enables continuous product improvement by highlighting customer behavior and expectations. For example, if a specific integration is in popular demand, implementing it can improve retention and satisfaction.
  2. It boosts revenue. Happy customers are more likely to extend their subscriptions and purchase additional features. Collecting and analyzing feedback allows you to provide more value, which increases sales, subscriptions, and revenue.
  3. It enhances brand reputation and lead generation. Customer satisfaction results in positive reviews and testimonials. This feedback supports brand reputation management efforts, attracting high-quality prospects. Therefore, better customer service lets you generate valuable leads without stretching your marketing budget.
  4. It helps you stay ahead of competitors. Happy and loyal customers give you a competitive edge by consistently choosing and advocating for you over other companies. Feedback analysis also improves product strategy, ensuring you continue delivering value that retains and acquires clients.

What User Feedback Metrics Are Essential for a SaaS Company to Track?

  1. Net Promoter Score
  2. Churn Rate
  3. Customer Lifetime Value
  4. Retention Rate
  5. Customer Satisfaction Score
  6. Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate
  7. Customer Effort Score
  8. Activation Rate
  9. Lead Conversion Rate

Customer feedback metrics provide data-driven insight into user activity and engagement. However, deciding which KPIs in customer experience to track can be overwhelming. Here’s a breakdown of the most impactful user feedback metrics for your SaaS business:

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a commonly used metric that measures customer loyalty. It asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product to others, usually on a 0-10 scale.

Customers are divided into three categories based on their numerical response: detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10). The goal is to convert as many users as possible into loyal customers promoting your product and business. 

You can use NPS surveys to gather responses and track the score to identify areas for improvement. InMoment’s survey design tools enable you to quickly create custom surveys that collect user feedback for tracking NPS.

Churn Rate

Customers churn when they stop using or interacting with your SaaS product. This can happen if your product fails to deliver value and better alternatives are available. Churn rate tracks the number of customers who abandon your product within a certain period.

A good practice is to understand the drivers of churn alongside monitoring the churn rate. For example, a recent change in your pricing model could explain the uptick in churn this quarter. Leveraging a churn prediction tool can help you understand why customers might leave, which enables you to retain them before it’s too late. 

InMoment offers text analytics solutions to let you capture customer intent from their feedback. The intent appears as a complaint, praise, suggestion, inquiry, purchase, will return, comparison, requested help, recommend, not recommend, and churn. This advanced analysis helps you identify churn indicators and proactively recover at-risk customers.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) predicts the total revenue a customer will bring your business throughout their relationship with you. This metric provides an accurate portrayal of the long-term value of the average customer. It enables you to evaluate the return on your acquisition and retention strategies.

Therefore, tracking CLV helps you identify high-value customers so that you can focus on engaging them. Retaining customers who boost your CLV will help you maximize revenue and reduce churn.

Retention Rate

Retention rate tracks the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions to your product over a specific period. It highlights the effectiveness of your customer retention and satisfaction efforts. A high rate indicates strong engagement with your product and loyalty to your brand.

You can measure the retention rate by comparing the number of paying users at the beginning and end of a period. For example, if you start a month with 50 active users and end with 30, your retention rate would be 60%.

Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures satisfaction levels with specific aspects of your product. These interactions could include navigating your website or talking to customer support. Companies collect this data through surveys asking customers to rate their satisfaction, typically on a 1-5 scale.

Tracking customer satisfaction helps you understand how to improve the customer journey. For example, if your low CSAT is due to a clunky website experience, you should focus on improving your user interface. 

Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate

While free plans are great for lead generation, paid plans drive revenue and impact your bottom line. The free-to-paid conversion rate measures the percentage of customers who shift from a free trial to a paid plan. 

This metric highlights the level of customer satisfaction and engagement with your product. It also shows how well your trial plan acquires new customers. A good trial should deliver enough value to intrigue clients while withholding key features that would be well worth the upgrade.

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) evaluates the effort customers put into using your SaaS product. Companies obtain this score through a CES survey, typically measuring the effort on a 5- or 7-point scale. A higher score indicates smoother product usage with low-effort interactions.

While a good product should be feature-rich, it won’t be able to deliver value if it’s difficult to use. 94% of customers with low-effort interactions intend to continue business, compared to just 4% in the high-effort category. Therefore, ease of use promotes continuous product usage, increasing retention and revenue.

Activation Rate

The activation rate measures the percentage of new users completing a key action after realizing the value of your product. These actions could include creating a profile or uploading a document. 

The truth is that every product’s user activation milestone will be different, so it’s impossible to define a benchmark action. However, the common theme with these actions is that they occur due to the customer finding genuine value in your product. 

Therefore, a high activation rate suggests that you are effectively onboarding customers. If you can quickly guide them to discover your product’s value, you will likely retain them. Tracking this metric can help you identify friction points in your onboarding process.

Lead Conversion Rate

Lead Conversion Rate tracks the percentage of leads that become paying customers. This metric evaluates the effectiveness of your marketing and sales teams in converting prospects. 

A high lead conversion rate indicates effective marketing and a strong value proposition. Tracking this metric helps you identify issues in the sales funnel, such as unclear messaging or ineffective follow-ups. It also guides strategy on delivering value to your target audience.

How to Collect User Feedback for SaaS?

  1. Invest in a high-quality user feedback tool
  2. Use surveys to collect key CX metrics
  3. Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback
  4. Leverage the power of social listening
  5. Collect feedback when customers leave
  6. Analyze customer support tickets
  7. Run beta tests for new features
  8. Close the feedback loop

Collecting user feedback is essential for SaaS businesses to deliver better experiences. Here are a few key feedback collection strategies to consider:

Invest in a high-quality user feedback tool

A comprehensive feedback tool makes all the difference if you struggle to collect and organize your customers’ opinions. The right tool is easy to use, scalable, and rich in analytical capabilities. It helps you collect and integrate customer data from every relevant source to avoid missing out on crucial information. As a result, you can build and analyze your dataset in one place for effective decision-making.

Use surveys to collect key CX metrics

Surveys are tried-and-tested tools for collecting user feedback. By following good design practices, you can gather actionable insights without causing survey fatigue. 74% of customers are only willing to answer five questions or less in a survey. Design surveys with concise, relevant questions to capture metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES.

A lack of personalization is another factor for low response rates. This is where InMoment’s conversational surveys have an edge over their traditional counterparts.

These surveys work by engaging customers and responding to them in real-time. They leverage generative AI to ask follow-up questions based on customers’ previous responses. As a result of its personalized, two-way communication, this method helps collect insightful feedback. 

Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback

Quantitative feedback, like NPS and retention rate, provides measurable data. It’s easy to track, analyze, and visualize. For example, a chart highlighting the trend in NPS over the last six months provides instant insight into your customer loyalty efforts.

However, quantitative data lacks context, so you can’t explain why your NPS is trending downward. Qualitative feedback provides the necessary information to better understand customer needs and expectations. For example, open-text comments from customers can reveal issues in your product that make it difficult for them to recommend you.

Leverage the power of social listening

There is only so much customer data you can collect through surveys. Social media platforms host vast amounts of unstructured feedback that can provide deeper insights into the customer experience. Comments, posts, threads, and other forms of content can feature opinions on your product, business, and competitors.

You can use InMoment’s social listening tool to track relevant keywords and conversations across your social media channels. It monitors mentions of your brand and product to flag potential issues or highlight positive experiences. Additionally, it can perform competitor analysis by tracking what your competition is doing right or wrong. This information is crucial to building effective marketing campaigns for retention and lead generation.

Collect feedback when customers leave

It’s essential to understand why customers cancel their subscriptions or downgrade their plans. A brief exit survey can provide insight into why they decided to churn. This feedback can guide retention strategy by helping you understand what you could have done differently. For example, if pricing is a significant factor, you can boost retention by introducing flexible plans.

Analyze customer support tickets

Categorizing and analyzing support tickets helps you spot recurring issues. For example, an increase in tickets regarding a specific feature is a good sign that it requires immediate improvements.

Tag and sort support tickets by category, urgency, and sentiment. This organization will simplify the process of capturing and analyzing customer feedback. Additionally, you can track issue resolution times to see if you’re delivering timely and practical support.

Run beta tests for new features

Beta testing offers a valuable opportunity to collect feedback before a full product rollout. This helps you identify areas for improvement and address critical issues before it’s too late. It also creates a collaborative environment where users feel invested in your product’s growth.

Ask the testers to rate the product’s functionality and usability. Collect feedback on bugs that could impact the average user’s experience. Use the input to refine your product so that it’s likelier to deliver value to your target audience.

Close the feedback loop

Closing the feedback loop is essential for building trust and showing customers you care. Inform your users about any changes you make due to their feedback. You can share updates through in-app notifications or even social media posts. Leverage automation to provide instant updates to customers, saving you time to invest in stronger customer relationships.

What Key Features Should a SaaS Company Prioritize when Choosing a User Feedback Tool?

A user feedback tool simplifies the collection and analysis of customer opinions. The right software helps you make the most of each interaction with your business. Key features to look for include:

  • Omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VoC): Your business will have incoming feedback from various sources, from surveys to social media channels. The right tool should pull and organize customer data from every relevant channel to provide accurate insights.

InMoment ensures a complete view of user sentiment across all touchpoints in their journey, delivering an omnichannel customer experience. It works by collecting and connecting VoC data from everywhere so you don’t miss out on critical insights regarding customer behavior.

  • Customizable Surveys: Your tool of choice should enable surveys tailored to your goals. With InMoment’s XI platform, you can create targeted surveys for your specific audience and data collection needs. It allows you to build surveys from scratch or choose from existing templates for flexible feedback collection.
  • Sentiment Analysis: AI-powered sentiment analysis helps you interpret unstructured feedback, such as reviews and comments. 

Industry analysts have recognized InMoment as a proven leader in natural language processing (NLP) with its ability to automate insights from user feedback. It helps you categorize feedback by sentiment and intent for effective CX management.

  • Integration Capabilities: The user feedback tool should integrate with existing systems for smooth and seamless workflows. 

InMoment helps you break free of silos by connecting experience data with CRM systems, ticketing platforms, or project management tools. These integrations help your teams transform customer data into actionable insights.

  • Real-Time Analytics and Reporting: Immediate insights into user feedback are crucial for making quick decisions. Therefore, a good feedback tool should let you visualize and share key CX metrics across your organization.

InMoment’s reporting features enable you to build custom reports featuring engaging visuals. Its dashboards support compelling storytelling, highlighting the effectiveness of your customer service efforts to stakeholders.

  • Automated Feedback Loops: Closing the feedback loop makes customers feel heard and valued. The right tool should automatically close feedback loops by providing instant updates to customers. 

InMoment leverages automation to help businesses send custom responses to user feedback, including updates, follow-up questions, or a note of gratitude. This enables you to boost customer loyalty while saving valuable time.

Top Customer Feedback Tools for SaaS Companies

  1. InMoment
  2. FeedBear
  3. Qualaroo
  4. Hootsuite
  5. UserVoice
  6. Userpilot
  7. Canny
  8. Zonka Feedback
  9. Usersnap
  10. SurveyMonkey

The right feedback tool can elevate your customer experience management efforts. With an overwhelming number of options available, we have rounded up the ten best tools to help you make an informed decision.

InMoment

InMoment leverages award-winning AI and CX tools to collect user feedback across the customer journey. It enables custom survey design, social listening, and reputation management to connect CX data from various sources.

The platform’s AI-enabled analytics generate actionable insights from the feedback to guide loyalty and retention strategies. With features like sentiment analysis, custom integrations, and journey mapping, InMoment helps you capture a comprehensive view of the customer experience in one place.

FeedBear

FeedBear helps businesses collect and manage feature requests through feedback boards and roadmaps. Its boards allow customers to upvote and comment, enabling businesses to identify the most popular and impactful requests. Finally, its changelog tools allow companies to document changes and close the feedback loop with customers.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo features a no-code survey builder that simplifies feedback collection for companies. Its crucial feature is Nudge™, which enables businesses to customize and deploy feedback collection intercepts on their channels. Qualaroo helps companies understand customer sentiment and behavior with word cloud engines and sentiment analysis.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that helps companies manage online interactions via a central dashboard. It allows businesses to create content, track brand mentions, and boost engagement across major social media channels.

Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform that helps businesses manage customer experiences. Key features include survey templates, analytics, and dashboards for visualizing NPS scores. Brands can leverage Userpilot to understand customer profiles better and monitor KPIs to determine areas for improvement in their CX efforts.

Canny

Canny is a user feedback platform for collecting and analyzing feature requests. Its feature voting and segmentation help businesses filter and prioritize requests according to key user segments. Canny also helps close the feedback loop by issuing automatic updates with its product changelog tool.

UserVoice

UserVoice lets businesses create a dedicated feedback portal for customers to share suggestions and comments. The voting feature helps highlight the most in-demand requests so that companies can make effective decisions. As a result, the platform provides community-driven insights into product improvement.

Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a multi-channel user feedback platform for capturing actionable insights from customers. Its no-code survey builder lets businesses create surveys from scratch or select from existing templates. The tool leverages sentiment analysis to highlight customer emotions and intent in feedback. With Zonka Feedback, companies can also visualize and share CX insights across teams.

Usersnap

Usersnap offers a range of features to streamline feedback collection. Businesses can use the tool to let customers provide detailed bug reports with screenshots and annotations. Users can also record themselves talking about the features they would like to see in the product. Usersnap also lets companies design surveys to capture metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is an established survey design tool that helps businesses collect feedback at various touchpoints. It supports multiple survey types, including market research, product feedback, marketing, and NPS surveys.

Better User Feedback and Richer Insights with InMoment

User feedback is a vital component of the customer-centric approach. It provides valuable insights into customer behavior to help you make smarter decisions. InMoment’s omnichannel, AI-driven user feedback tool for SaaS businesses simplifies the collection and analysis of customer data to drive growth and revenue. See how InMoment can elevate your CX efforts by scheduling a demo today!

Sources 

Zendesk. 35 customer experience statistics to know for 2024 (https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics). Accessed 11/20/2024.

InMoment. What Is Customer Effort Score (CES)? (https://inmoment.com/xi-terms/customer-effort-score). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Enchant. 108 Customer Service Statistics & Facts You Must Know for 2023 (https://www.enchant.com/customer-service-statistics). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Voice of Customer Analysis to Improve Customer Loyalty and Retention

Voice of Customer (VoC) analysis is the process of understanding the intent and expectations behind customer feedback. Monitoring and analyzing key VoC metrics can help businesses deliver consistently positive experiences.
VoC analysis data on a laptop

Customers are increasingly likely to switch brands if they don’t feel satisfied. 83% of customers agree they feel more loyal to companies that respond to and resolve their complaints. Loyal customers are likely to spend more and advocate for your brand. As a result, businesses must double down on efforts to understand their customers’ goals and pain points to drive loyalty. Voice of Customer analysis is a useful system for accomplishing this goal.

What Is Voice of Customer Analysis?

Voice of Customer (VoC) refers to customer feedback on a business and its offerings. It includes thoughts, feelings, and opinions regarding the brand, product, or service. The process helps you build a rich dataset that provides insight into customer behavior.

The next step is identifying patterns in this data to help you better understand your customers. Voice of Customer analysis enables you to capture these key insights for customer satisfaction and retention.

For example, this analysis can reveal why a customer canceled their subscription to your service. Their feedback across various touchpoints on the customer journey will highlight how you can better retain similar customers.

Importance of Customer Analytics

Customer analytics provides a blueprint for delivering exceptional customer service. Here are a few reasons why it’s a powerful tool for brands:

  • It helps improve customer satisfaction. VoC analysis enables you to understand overall satisfaction levels with your business. For example, key metrics like CSAT help you improve aspects of your business to satisfy specific customer needs.
  • It enables informed decision-making for CX teams. VoC insights help businesses make data-driven decisions for customer experience (CX) improvements. The data shows what features to prioritize to enhance customer perception. For example, if price is a significant factor for your customers, you can satisfy them by adjusting your pricing model or offering loyalty rewards.
  • It informs product improvement strategy. A deeper understanding of customer expectations highlights areas for improvement. It shows you what features to prioritize based on customer pain points. As a result, you can continuously improve your product or service to meet changing customer needs.
  • It gives you a competitive advantage. Enhanced customer service helps retain existing customers and supports brand reputation management. Positive word of mouth helps you attract prospects away from your competitors. As a result, you can increase your market share with this customer-centric approach.

Voice of the Customer analysis is emerging as a key consumer trend for 2025 and is poised for continued growth in the years ahead. Businesses are set to revolutionize how they gather and respond to customer feedback, shifting from traditional surveys to AI-driven VoC analytics. Companies that embrace these advanced tools will gain a powerful competitive advantage, enabling them to understand and meet customer needs in real-time. Get more details about the future of Voice of the Customer analysis and other key insights in our 2025 Consumer Trends Report.

How To Analyze Data From VOC?

Voice of Customer analysis starts by categorizing the customer feedback data. This helps you create targeted approaches for identifying patterns in each category. The four main VoC data categories are as follows:

  • Unstructured feedback refers to open-ended responses in the form of emails and social media content. Analyzing this qualitative data requires conversational analytics solutions, such as the ones offered by InMoment. These tools help capture customer intent and sentiment from unstructured feedback for improved service.
  • Structured feedback appears as quantitative data on customer loyalty and satisfaction. You ask customers to rate their feelings and experiences on a numerical scale. Structured data is easier to track and analyze, enabling straightforward insights.
  • Unsolicited feedback is when customers provide feedback without requests or prompts from your side. For example, a customer reviews your latest feature in a Facebook post. 

Any online conversation around your brand provides an opportunity to collect unsolicited feedback. With the help of InMoment’s social listening tool, you can monitor this public opinion to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. It also keeps you in the loop regarding competitor behavior to help you further refine your marketing efforts.

  • Solicited feedback is when you proactively ask customers their opinions and feelings about your brand. Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods of collecting solicited feedback.

Key Metrics To Track for Voice of Customer Analysis

  • Net Promoter Score
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Response Rate
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • Churn Rate

VoC metrics provide valuable insight into customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are some KPIs in customer experience to help you understand the effectiveness of your CX efforts:

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular metric for tracking customer loyalty. It asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service, typically on a 0-10 scale. Responses are categorized into three groups: detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10).

With InMoment’s XI platform, you can leverage NPS survey design tools to collect the data you need to analyze this metric. You can also create intuitive dashboards to monitor your NPS in one place and make adjustments when necessary. This will help you increase the number of promoters among your customers for improved business performance.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) asks customers to rate their satisfaction with your brand and offerings, typically on a 1-5 scale. 

Low scores highlight customers at risk of churning, making it necessary to retain them. Businesses prioritizing retention over customer acquisition are 60% more profitable. Therefore, regularly tracking satisfaction levels with a customer satisfaction survey is important to increase repeat business.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Did you know that customers with a high-effort interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% with a low-effort experience? 

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort customers have to put into interactions with your business. It is usually measured on a 5- or 7-point scale, with a higher score corresponding to smoother interactions.

For example, if it’s difficult for the average individual to find customer support on your website, they will be dissatisfied. Tracking CES helps you evaluate aspects of your business that require high effort so that you can simplify them. Since CES is a strong indicator of loyalty, it’s important to focus on delivering smooth experiences.

Response Rate

This metric highlights engagement levels with your surveys. For example, if you send out a monthly customer feedback questionnaire and only 10% of customers respond, it suggests low engagement. This is concerning since you need customer responses to build your VoC program in the first place.

Focusing on good survey design can help improve the response rate. Make your surveys short and simple to prevent fatigue. You can also offer incentives like gift cards for survey completion. A higher response rate provides a wide range of customer insight, making it easier to understand and address common issues.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV helps estimate the total revenue a customer will bring during their entire relationship with the business. It factors in data like customer lifespan, purchase frequency, and transaction history.

Monitoring CLV helps you understand and improve the long-term value of your customers. It helps inform loyalty strategies to reduce customer churn and drive revenue.

Churn Rate

Churn rate indicates the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a specific period. 

High customer churn indicates dissatisfaction with your brand. If your competitors deliver better services, your customers won’t have to think twice about switching. Therefore, lowering the churn rate is key to increasing revenue and maintaining a competitive edge.

Identifying churn drivers is the first step to reducing churn. If feedback analysis suggests that customers expect more incentives, you can retain more customers by investing in a loyalty program.

Voice of the Customer Analysis Methods

  1. Define your VoC Goals. 
  2. Collect Customer Data.
  3. Leverage Advanced Analytics Tools.
  4. Take Action.
  5. Involve Stakeholders and Teams.

Once you identify key metrics, you can implement analytical methods to improve them. Your exact strategy will depend on your goals and will require adjustment over time based on performance.

Define your VoC Goals

Understanding your most pressing problems as a business will help you make the most of your VoC data. Define your problems and establish specific goals you want to accomplish. You should know exactly why and how you want to analyze customer data.

An example could be tracking and improving the NPS as part of your customer loyalty efforts. This step narrows your focus on high-priority issues for effective resolution. Additionally, it ensures your program is unique to your business and customer needs.

Collect Customer Data

Establish comprehensive systems to collect data across the customer journey. You can capture solicited feedback from customers through surveys and questionnaires. These surveys should be simple and easy to complete, combining qualitative and quantitative data collection.

However, surveys alone aren’t enough in the online age. Customers are vocal about their experiences on review sites and social media platforms. Online activity, from a simple comment to a detailed thread, is an opportunity to collect unsolicited customer feedback.

Besides providing actionable insights, social listening helps prevent survey fatigue. Since you don’t have to send frequent surveys to learn as much as possible, you won’t be overwhelming your customers! Instead, you can tap into unbiased feedback to capture a complete view of the customer sentiment towards your brand.

Leverage Advanced Analytics Tools

Analyze the customer feedback to uncover insights into current trends and expectations. Look for patterns in the data to understand customer perception regarding your product or service. 

A common analytical method is to track key metrics according to your goals. For example, if you see a downward trend in CES over the past few months, a newly released feature is likely creating friction in the customer experience.

What about textual data in the form of reviews, call center scripts, and social media activity? The Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach helps analyze this unstructured data for valuable insights. It uses machine learning and vast amounts of data to uncover customer sentiment and intent.

You can leverage NLP for your business needs with the help of InMoment’s text analytics software. Its award-winning NLP engine transforms textual data into meaningful insights for smarter decision-making. These insights include the customer’s intent, perceived effort, and overall sentiment. As a result, you can take immediate and effective action to improve customer experiences.

Another valuable technique in VoC analysis is data correlation. This statistical tool helps you understand how specific variables relate to each other. In the context of customer service, it can help you understand how features of your business affect key CX metrics.

For example, making your website more user-friendly might correlate to a higher CES. But, does this increase in CES improve the overall CSAT? You might find that another variable, like “product quality”, impacts CSAT more than “ease of use”!

Take Action

Customers provide feedback with the expectation that improvements will follow. Therefore, once you have completed your VoC analysis, it’s time to act on the conclusions and insights.

Start with high-priority issues and create an action plan for resolving them. For example, if most of the negative sentiment is focused on your website, you must prioritize immediate UI/UX improvements. 

Ensure you close the feedback loop with customers by following up with them after taking action. This step helps you affirm the impact of your efforts and fosters customer loyalty.

Involve Stakeholders and Teams

VoC analysis is most effective when it’s a collaborative effort. Start by sharing insights with relevant departments. For example, if you identify long wait times in customer service, the support team can work on optimizing response times. At the same time, the operations team can look at resource allocation to address capacity issues.

Engage the leadership by showing how VoC analysis affects company goals like boosting retention and revenue. Along with cross-functional collaboration, the buy-in from leaders ensures consistency in addressing customer needs. Invest in a centralized CX platform to make VoC insights accessible across teams in real-time.

What To Look For in a Voice of Customer Analysis Tool

Collecting and analyzing the voice of the customer enables continuous business improvements. It encourages a customer-centric approach that helps you meet evolving needs and enhance your brand reputation. The right voice of customer analysis tool simplifies this process and helps address potential challenges. Key features to look for include:

  • Omnichannel Feedback Collection: The voice of the customer comes from many different sources, including surveys, social media, reviews, and call center interactions. Invest in a tool that supports omnichannel data collection to capture a complete view of customer sentiment.

You can leverage NLP for your business needs with the help of InMoment’s text analytics software. Its award-winning NLP engine transforms textual data into meaningful insights for smarter decision-making. These insights include the customer’s intent, perceived effort, and overall sentiment. As a result, you can take immediate and effective action to improve customer experiences.

  • Sentiment Analysis: Look for advanced sentiment analysis capabilities that classify feedback as positive, negative, or neutral. This helps you gauge overall customer satisfaction and spot emerging issues.

InMoment’s advanced sentiment analysis combines key metrics and real-time intelligence to help you better understand customer feelings.

  • Real-Time Insights: It’s crucial to have real-time updates when tracking key VoC metrics. This feature helps reduce potential churn by providing instant insights into customer behavior. The sooner you learn of a dip in satisfaction levels, the quicker you can react and recover.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP-powered tools can analyze unstructured text data like reviews or comments to uncover customer intent and pain points.

InMoment’s award-winning text analysis uncovers the meaning and emotion behind each piece of feedback. It helps you accurately understand the customer experience so you can work to improve it.

  • Predictive Analytics: The tool you select should also support AI-driven predictions of customer behavior, including churn. This feature is useful as it helps brands proactively deal with issues and retain customers before it’s too late.

InMoment offers churn prediction capabilities to help businesses understand why and which customers may churn. It leverages machine learning algorithms and text analysis to identify churn drivers accurately. This enables brands to take a proactive approach to customer retention and reduce acquisition costs.

  • Customizable Dashboards and Reporting: Choose a tool with intuitive dashboards to track and visualize key metrics. InMoment’s reporting capabilities help you build impactful visuals for effectively sharing VoC analysis results with stakeholders.

How InMoment can help with Voice of Customer Analysis

Voice of Customer analysis is a powerful tool for elevating your CX program. It helps you understand customer preferences and expectations so you can better meet them. InMoment’s software handles the VoC analytical workload, allowing you to act on the insights and strengthen customer relationships. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment can help you transform customer feedback into CX improvements!

Sources 

Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024 (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 11/14/2024.

G2. 69+ Eye-Opening Customer Retention Statistics to Know in 2024 (https://www.g2.com/articles/customer-retention-statistics). Accessed 11/14/2024.

Addressing AI Hallucinations for Improved Business Performance

AI hallucinations occur when AI models generate incorrect or made-up responses. These hallucinations create challenges across industries relying on AI, causing customer dissatisfaction and reputational harm. Addressing this issue is key to improving business performance and customer experiences.
Graphic of AI and a user on a laptop.

Think about the last time you asked ChatGPT a fairly simple question but got an unexpected response. Perhaps it provided a factually incorrect statement or just misunderstood your prompt. The result is described as a “hallucination”, a growing concern for businesses using AI systems.

What is an AI hallucination?

An AI hallucination occurs when an AI system produces false or misleading results as facts. A popular example is a large language model (LLM) giving a fabricated answer to a prompt it fails to understand.

Humans hallucinate when they see something that isn’t there. While AI models don’t “see” anything, the concept works well to describe their output when it’s inconsistent with reality. These hallucinations are mainly the result of issues with the training data. If the model is trained on insufficient or biased data, it’s likely to generate incorrect outputs.

An AI system is only as good as the data you feed it. It doesn’t “know” anything beyond its training data and has no concept of fact or fiction. An AI model like ChatGPT has one goal: predict the most appropriate response to a prompt. The problem is that its prediction can sometimes be well off the mark!

Types of AI hallucinations

There are various types of hallucinations, based on what a model contradicts:

  • Prompt contradiction is when an LLM’s output is inconsistent with the information requested in the prompt. An example would be responding with an anniversary message to a prompt asking for a birthday card.
  • Factual contradiction is when an LLM produces an incorrect answer as fact. For example, responding with “New York” to a question about the French capital.
  • Random hallucination occurs when the model’s output has no connection with the prompt. If you ask for a chocolate cake recipe and receive a phrase like “Owls are nocturnal birds” in response, that would be a random hallucination.
  • Sentence contradiction is when an LLM generates a sentence that contradicts its previous sentence. An example would be saying “Roses are red” only to say “Roses are purple” later in the output.

AI Hallucination Examples

  1. Stating obvious errors or false information as fact.
  2. Making up information and references. 
  3. Misunderstanding the prompt.
  4. Providing incomplete information or context.

Generative AI has made impressive progress in content generation. However, it’s still capable of generating incorrect or misleading information. These hallucinations are a concern for AI in customer experience, affecting individuals and businesses alike. Here are some common examples of AI hallucinations in real-world systems.

Stating obvious errors or false information as fact

AI models sometimes generate text that is inconsistent with factual information. A famous example of this hallucination is Gemini’s incorrect response in a promotional video. The chatbot, formerly Bard, was asked, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?” 

Gemini claimed that the JWST took the first image of a planet outside our solar system. This information is false since it was the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) that took the first photos of an exoplanet back in 2004!

Making up information and references

AI models may invent details or references that don’t exist. For example, Google’s AI Overview generated this response to a prompt asking how long one should stare at the sun for best health:

According to WebMD, scientists say that staring at the sun for 5-15 minutes, or up to 30 minutes if you have darker skin, is generally safe and provides the most health benefits.

AI Overview states incorrect information here and wrongly attributes it to WebMD.

Similarly, speech-to-text AI tools that transcribe audio recordings are prone to hallucinations. For example, transcription tools tend to insert random phrases from their training data when they encounter a pause in the audio. 

A concerning fact is that these phrases can be inaccurate and misleading, or even worse offensive and potentially harmful such as incorrect treatments in the case of medical transcriptions. Therefore, the inability of traditional AI tools to handle breaks in audio can have negative consequences for organizations.

Misunderstanding the prompt

A generative AI system may respond appropriately but still misunderstand your prompt. An example of this hallucination is asking ChatGPT to solve a Wordle puzzle. 

While the system generates a coherent response, its solutions tend to be well off the mark. For instance, it may suggest a word that doesn’t match the pattern of letters you provide as input.

Providing incomplete information or context

Sometimes, AI models fail to respond comprehensively, leading to dangerous results. Once again, Google’s AI Overview provides an example of this occurrence. It generated largely correct information when asked which wild mushrooms are safe to eat.

However, it failed to specify how to identify fatal mushrooms. It suggested that mushrooms with “solid white flesh” are safe to eat, but it didn’t mention that some dangerous variants have the same feature.

What Problems Does AI Hallucination Cause?

AI hallucinations create challenges across various industries. Its inaccurate predictions and information hurt the customer experience, impacting the business’s reputation. Here are some of the problems these hallucinations cause in key sectors:

Healthcare

AI has become a significant part of healthcare workflows. Its ability to summarize patient information and even help with diagnoses is impactful. One of its most notable applications is transcribing medical visits. AI-powered transcriptions help doctors record and review patient interactions to make informed decisions.

It is vital to maintain accuracy and completeness in these transcriptions. A hallucination in the text would make it difficult to provide effective treatment and diagnoses. 

For example, OpenAI’s Whisper, an AI-powered transcription tool, raised concerns by inventing phrases during moments of silence in medical conversations. Researchers found that Whisper was hallucinating in 1.4% of its transcriptions. This is a significant figure given that the tool had been used to transcribe around 7 million patient visits.

Some hallucinations were in the form of irrelevant text like “Thank you for watching!” during a conversation break in the transcription. Other instances were far more concerning, including fake medication like “hyperactivated antibiotics” and racial remarks. These hallucinations can have harmful consequences as they misinterpret the patient’s intent, leading to misdiagnoses and irrelevant treatments.

Contact Centers

In customer service, contact center AI hallucinations can damage brand credibility. Customers won’t be able to trust a business after getting an inappropriate response to their queries. 

For example, a chatbot might give incorrect information about a product, policy, or support steps. Similarly, transcription tools often hallucinate phrases during pauses in agent-customer conversations. These hallucinations can provide an inaccurate view of the customer’s experience, resulting in poor analysis that fails to solve actual pain points.

Therefore, your CX program will suffer if it’s relying on inaccurate call center transcriptions. Despite your best intentions, a hallucination could be enough to cause customer dissatisfaction.

Unlike traditional tools, InMoment’s advanced AI-powered solution addresses this specific problem to ensure your CX team accurately records customer interactions. As a result, you can be ensured you’re taking the right steps towards improving the customer experience.

Legal

AI enables legal professionals to save time on research and brief generation. Generative AI models can help produce drafts and summarize key points. However, due to hallucinations, relying on these models for crucial information like legal references can be tricky.

A law firm was fined $5,000 after its lawyers submitted fake citations hallucinated by ChatGPT in a court filing. The model invented six cases, which the lawyers used to support their arguments without verifying their accuracy. These cases were either not real, misidentified judges, or featured non-existent airlines.

Finance

In the financial sector, where precision is crucial, AI hallucinations can be costly. While AI systems can help crunch numbers, they can also hurt financial services reputation management efforts. Inaccurate financial reporting can affect investment decisions and stakeholder trust.

A popular instance is Microsoft’s first public demo of Bing AI. The model wrongly summarized a Q3 financial report for Gap, incorrectly reporting the gross and operating margins. 

For example, the report stated a gross margin of 37.4 percent and an adjusted gross margin of 38.7% (excluding an impairment charge). However, Bing incorrectly reported the 37.4% margin as inclusive of adjustments and impairments.

Media and Journalism

Journalism suffers from AI hallucinations, such as fabricated quotes and inaccurate facts. While generative AI can help draft news stories and articles, it should combine human editing and verification to ensure accuracy. Otherwise, a single misstep like a misattributed quote can cause public backlash and reputational harm.

Education

The education sector has benefited from AI for research purposes. For instance, AI models are reasonably good at summarizing articles, generating ideas, and writing whole sections. Just like legal professionals, though, students and researchers must be extra careful with references.

For example, a librarian at the University of Southern California was asked to produce articles based on a list of 35 references provided by a professor. Despite her vast experience, the librarian couldn’t locate a single article. The professor eventually revealed that since ChatGPT invented these references, the articles simply didn’t exist!

This example highlights a common challenge for AI models. The National Institute of Health found that up to 47% of ChatGPT references are fabricated. Human oversight is essential to prevent incorrect citations and loss of trust.

Why Does AI Hallucinate?

  1. Low-Quality Training Data
  2. Overfitting
  3. Lack of Real-World Grounding
  4. Inability to Fact-Check

AI hallucinations are a by-product of how we design and train these systems. Common causes include:

Low-Quality Training Data 

An AI model is only as good as the data you provide. Biased, outdated, and insufficient datasets will cause AI to generate inappropriate results. Even if it doesn’t understand your prompt, AI will craft a response based on its data, resulting in factual contradictions.

Overfitting

Even with the best training data, AI models will suffer if they can’t generalize to new data. An excellent accuracy score in the training phase sounds good in theory. But, what if the model is simply memorizing inputs and outputs? It won’t be able to produce accurate predictions or information when presented with inputs it hasn’t seen before. It’s important to prevent overfitting the model to ensure reliability in real-world systems.

Lack of Real-World Grounding

Many AI models are trained without real-world situational grounding. Think about the examples in which AI invents legal and academic references. These fabrications occur because AI struggles to understand real-world facts and physical properties. As a result, it produces outputs that look coherent but are inconsistent with reality. 

Inability to Fact-Check

AI systems aren’t designed to fact-check information. They can only rely on patterns in the training data, even if they are incorrect or outdated. The lack of real-world understanding and fact-checking highlights the importance of human oversight for verification.

How to Prevent AI Hallucinations?

  1. Create restraints to limit outcomes
  2. High-quality training data
  3. Use data templates
  4. Combine with human oversight
  5. Provide clear, specific prompts

Preventing AI hallucinations requires specific prompting and improvements in training. Effective approaches include:

Create restraints to limit outcomes

AI models are trained to respond to prompts, even with little to no relevant information. This is how issues like inappropriate responses regarding dangerous mushrooms arise. 

Therefore, it’s important to set restraints limiting the possible outcomes AI can generate. This occurs during the training phase, where you can provide examples and formats that encourage the AI to respond in a certain way. This prevents extreme outcomes and reduces the likelihood of hallucinations.

High-quality training data

The training data sets the foundation for generative AI results. High-quality training data is specific, complete, and free of biases. Using relevant data for a specific use case will enable the AI to produce consistently helpful outputs.

Use data templates

A template is helpful because it guides the AI model toward complete and accurate outputs. For example, if your model skips the introduction section in its articles, a template can encourage it to produce better responses. Data templates ensure consistency and reduce the likelihood of incorrect outcomes.

Combine with human oversight

Human oversight is valuable for ensuring AI accuracy. The models’ inability to fact-check their sources and ground their outputs in the real world can make them unreliable. 

Regularly monitoring and reviewing AI outputs helps humans adjust AI performance for consistency and reliability. Human review also ensures the AI remains up-to-date with current trends and information. This prevents misinformation and improves model performance over time.

Provide clear, specific prompts

Clear prompts guide the AI toward the correct response. Specific and relevant inputs reduce the likelihood of inaccurate outputs. Vague prompts can lead to misinterpretation, resulting in hallucinations. Specific and targeted prompts help AI understand the context and expectations, improving response quality and relevance.

Can AI hallucinations be fixed?

You can prevent hallucinations by improving the training process and investing in good generative AI solutions.

For example, InMoment’s CX-trained LLMs are specifically designed to address customer queries. It leverages sentiment analysis to understand customer intent and generate meaningful responses. As a result, your CX teams save time and effort that they can invest in building deeper customer relationships.

InMoment AI is particularly useful for preventing hallucinations in transcribed conversations. Traditional AI systems hallucinate when they encounter pauses in conversations. Since they aren’t trained to handle moments of silence, they respond with random phrases from their training data. Think about how Whisper would include statements like “Thank you for watching!” in its medical visit transcriptions!

InMoment’s solution works around this issue by detecting and removing all pauses in the audio file. As a result, it avoids hallucinating and processes all the words exchanged in an interaction to provide a complete and accurate transcription. This is helpful for healthcare and contact centers, enabling them to understand their clients and respond correctly.

Will AI hallucinations go away?

According to experts like Meta’s Yann LeCun, AI hallucinations are unsolvable. However, advancements in training and prompt engineering will reduce these occurrences over time. Combining human oversight and good model design practices can help you address hallucinations before they impact your business.

InMoment’s Awarding Advanced AI 

AI hallucinations can impact business performance by providing inappropriate responses to customers. The good news is that the right generative AI solution can help prevent these hallucinations.

With the help of InMoment Advanced AI, you can quickly generate complete and meaningful responses to customer feedback. It combines sentiment analysis, predictive modeling, and real-time insights to help you drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The Power of Customer Behavior Analysis

Customer behavior analysis refers to the process of studying, analyzing, and acting on your customers' behavior. Actively analyzing customer behavior can help your business improve operations, marketing efforts, and help build stronger customer relationships.
Business Man working with blank screen

Did you know that social media is the number one discovery channel for products? Furthermore, when researching a brand or product, most consumers prefer to do their own research rather than speak to a human. 

Knowing these consumer behaviors and how they relate to your business can significantly impact your overall business performance. To capitalize on those behaviors, you need to be able to perform customer behavior analysis. 

What Is Customer Behavior Analysis?

Customer behavior analysis is the process of studying and interpreting how customers interact with a business at each stage of the customer journey. This involves looking at what customers do, such as browsing, purchasing, or abandoning a page, and understanding why they make those choices. When businesses apply customer behavior analysis, they shift from reacting to customer demands to anticipating them. 

Customer Behavior Analysis vs Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping focuses on visualizing customers’ different pathways with a business throughout their customer experience. The customer journey is not the same process for every customer. Customer behavior analysis seeks to understand the underlying motivations and drivers behind a customer’s decisions. This can include observable actions such as purchase frequency or website clicks as well as inferred behaviors such as willingness to try new products or price changes. 

Why Is Customer Behavior Analysis Important

Customer behavior analysis provides information that helps businesses meet customer needs, build stronger relationships, and drive business growth. By understanding customer motivations, your business can make decisions that lead to higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. Here are a few reasons why customer behavior analysis is so valuable: 

  • Enhanced personalization
  • Improved customer retention
  • Better product development
  • Informed marketing decisions
  • Competitive advantage

Enhanced Personalization

When you understand how customers interact with products, services, and content, you can personalize experiences in meaningful ways. By identifying specific customer preferences—such as preferred products, content types, or communication channels—you can tailor marketing messages, recommendations, and services to each customer’s needs. 

Improved Customer Retention

It is no secret that retaining customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. By analyzing customer behavior, you can identify factors that lead to churn, such as delayed purchases, disengagement, or negative feedback. Early intervention —like offering incentives to at-risk customers or resolving pain points—can prevent customer loss and improve customer churn

Better Product Development

Customer behavior insights can allow your company to make data-driven decisions about product offerings. By understanding which products are most popular, how they are being used, and what customers are searching for, you can identify gaps in your offering and prioritize the development of certain features or improvements to current ones. 

Informed Marketing Decisions

Analyzing customer behavior allows you to craft more effective marketing strategies. Customer behavior data reveals which campaigns, channels, and messaging resonate most with different customer segments. This enables marketers to focus their resources where they’ll have the highest impact. 

Competitive Advantage

Understanding customer behavior can be a key differentiator in today’s business environment. If your business can effectively analyze and utilize customer behavior insights, you can stay ahead of your competitors by being more innovative and customer-focused. 

Types of Customer Behavior Data

To fully understand customer behavior, you will need to gather different types of data that provide a comprehensive view of behavior, preferences, and engagement. Here are the main categories of customer behavior data that can help you build rich customer profiles: 

Demographic Data

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Income level
  • Education
  • Occupation

Demographic data gives you insight into customer characteristics that often influence their preferences, buying power, and purchasing habits. Demographic data serves as a foundational layer for customer behavior analysis as it helps you segment your audience. 

Psychographic Data

  • Customer lifestyle 
  • Interests
  • Values
  • Attitudes
  • Personality traits

Psychographic data unveils the motivations that drive customer behavior. It can help you understand why your customers make certain choices. Using this data, you can construct targeted messages that resonate with individual values and interests. 

Behavioral Data

  • Purchase history
  • Browsing activity 
  • Engagement with content or promotions

Behavioral data helps you identify patterns in how customers engage with products, websites, or marketing materials. It sheds light on preferred products, purchasing frequency, and typical customer journeys. Using behavioral data, you can improve the user experience based on actual customer behavior. 

Transactional Data

  • Purchase frequency
  • Average order value
  • Payment methods
  • Return rates

Transactional data provides a snapshot of a customer’s financial interactions with your business. This data can help you identify high-value customers, track purchasing trends, and evaluate the success of certain promotions, packages, or discounts. It also reveals revenue-driving behaviors, which can be valuable information for customer loyalty programs. 

Engagement Data

  • Email open rate
  • Social media interactions
  • Website visits
  • In-app usage

Engagement data helps you understand the depth of customer interactions with your organization. It can help you identify which channels are most effective for reaching specific customer segments, how engaged customers are with content, and where opportunities exist for deeper engagement. 

Customer Behavior Analysis Methods

To effectively analyze customer behavior using the data collected above, you will need to mix qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods. Here are some key methods for analyzing customer behavior: 

  • Quantitative research
  • Quantitative data analysis
  • Predictive analytics
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Cohort analysis

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research and analysis involve asking open-ended questions to encourage customers to share their thoughts in their own words. This can reveal emotional drivers, such as UX frustrations, that may not surface in quantitative data. Open-ended questions can be used in surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups. 

Quantitative Data Analysis

Quantitative analysis uses website and/or app analytics combined with CRM data to analyze numerical data. Quantitative data offers a broad view of customer behavior across large segments. The trends identified can inform marketing decisions, product development, and sales strategies. 

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics models use past historical data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to make educated predictions about future customer actions, such as likelihood to purchase, churn risk, or response to specific promotions. Predictive analytics allows you to anticipate customer needs and take proactive steps. For example, by identifying customers likely to churn, you can implement retention strategies before you lose a customer.

InMoment’s predictive customer analytics solution uses proprietary AI to extract insights from customer data. This allows you to spend more time executing action plans rather than getting caught up in data analysis. One of the biggest benefits of InMoment AI is its ability to make large volumes of customer feedback easily digestible in Smart Summaries. 

Smart Summary in InMoment's platform that summarizes large volumes of customer feedback.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping tracks every touchpoint customers encounter with your organization. This reveals where they may encounter friction, drop off, or engage. It can help you understand how customers progress through the decision-making process. By mapping the customer journey, you can identify areas for improvement in your customer experience. 

InMoment can go one step further with AI Journey Insights, which helps businesses transform multichannel customer feedback into actionable strategies. By gathering data from sources like surveys, reviews, and calls, the InMoment platform uses NLP and AI to identify and categorize key journey touchpoints. Generative AI then evaluates each touchpoint’s impact on customer experience and suggests improvements. These insights are visualized in a way that inspires teams to take ownership, collaborate on solutions, and explore potential outcomes through simulations, driving meaningful changes to enhance the customer journey.

Cohort Analysis

Cohort analysis tracks the behaviors of customers who have been grouped together into cohorts. These cohorts are created based on shared characteristics or behaviors like the month of purchase, campaign type, or location. Cohort analysis tracks the behaviors of these specific groups over time, which allows you to observe how certain factors influence long-term engagement, retention, and churn. 

Tools for Customer Behavior Analysis

The effectiveness of your customer behavior analysis is largely dependent on the tools you use to complete it. Here are some of the top customer behavior analysis tools to be aware of: 

1. InMoment

InMoment offers a comprehensive suite of CX tools designed to capture customer feedback across various touchpoints, including surveys, social media, and online reviews. Using AI-driven analytics, InMoment provides actionable insights to help companies improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Its platform also includes sentiment analysis, benchmarking, and journey mapping to offer a full view of customer experiences and emotional drivers.

2. Qualtrics

Known for its experience management platform, Qualtrics enables businesses to collect and analyze customer, employee, product, and brand experience data. Its powerful analytics and feedback collection tools make it easy for companies to understand customer expectations and pain points. With capabilities like predictive intelligence and real-time insights, Qualtrics helps businesses anticipate customer needs and take action to improve experiences quickly.

3. Medallia

Medallia specializes in customer feedback and experience management, using AI and machine learning to analyze customer interactions across web, social, mobile, and in-store channels. Medallia’s platform is designed to capture real-time feedback and deliver insights directly to employees, enabling organizations to respond quickly to customer needs. With features like text and speech analytics, Medallia helps businesses understand customer sentiment and trends.

4. Zendesk

Zendesk provides a robust customer service and support platform that integrates CX insights into ticketing, messaging, and live chat. Designed for ease of use, Zendesk offers tools for tracking customer issues, measuring satisfaction, and analyzing behavior through support interactions. Its reporting capabilities help companies identify recurring issues, improving customer support quality and response times.

5. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a unified platform for customer experience management, focusing heavily on social media and online engagement. Its tools track customer sentiment, monitor brand mentions, and provide detailed analytics across various channels. Sprinklr’s CX suite includes social listening, customer care, and AI-driven insights, helping businesses gain a 360-degree view of customer sentiment and preferences on digital and social platforms. 

How to Use Customer Behavior Analysis to Improve the Customer Experience

Customer behavior analysis is invaluable for improving the customer experience at your organization. Here are some ways your business can leverage customer behavior data to boost customer experience and business performance: 

Personalized Marketing Campaigns

Customer behavior insights enable you to create highly personalized marketing messages that resonate with the segment’s unique interests and needs. Tailored messaging, such as targeted emails or personalized content suggestions, can help increase engagement and conversion rates. 

Optimized Product Recommendations

By analyzing purchase history, browsing behavior, and more, you can suggest relevant products or services that create a more satisfying and valuable experience for your customers. This can also help you increase cross-sell and upsell opportunities by presenting items that customers are more likely to purchase. 

Enhanced Customer Support

Customer behavior data lets your business anticipate common customer issues and proactively offer support. For example, if customers frequently abandon their carts at a particular customer journey stage, companies can address this with targeted assistance. 

Improved Website and App Experiences

Customer behavior analysis can reveal which website or app features users find most valuable and which ones cause frustration. By optimizing navigation, layout, and content based on behavior data, you can create a more intuitive and enjoyable user experience. 

Predictive Retention Strategies

Analyzing behavior patterns can help businesses identify customers at risk of churning and implement timely retention strategies, such as personalized offers or re-engagement emails, to keep them engaged.

Challenges in Customer Behavior Analysis

While customer behavior analysis can offer many benefits, some businesses may face challenges in effectively gathering, interpreting, and applying behavior data. Here are some common obstacles: 

Data Privacy and Compliance

With regulations like GDPR and CCPA, businesses must handle customer data responsibly. Ensuring compliance and maintaining data security can be complex, especially when analyzing large amounts of data from various sources.

Data Overload

Businesses collect vast quantities of data from multiple channels, and not all is useful. Sorting through data to identify relevant, actionable insights requires careful filtering and prioritization to avoid getting overwhelmed.

Interpreting Data Accurately

Misinterpreting customer behavior data can lead to flawed decisions. Without careful analysis, businesses may make incorrect assumptions about customer preferences or behaviors, resulting in ineffective strategies.

Integrating Data Across Platforms

Many companies use multiple tools for gathering and analyzing data, which can lead to siloed information. Integrating data across platforms ensures a unified view of the customer but can be challenging without the right infrastructure.

Acting on Insights Effectively

Gathering data is only the first step; applying insights requires coordination across teams and often significant changes to processes. Without the right implementation strategies, valuable data insights may go unused.

Future Trends in Customer Behavior Analysis

Customer behavior analysis is evolving as new technologies and customer expectations reshape the landscape. Here are some trends to watch:

1. AI and Machine Learning for Deeper Insights

AI and machine learning algorithms are becoming essential for identifying complex behavior patterns and predicting future actions. These technologies make it easier to personalize interactions at scale, enhancing customer satisfaction and engagement.

2. Behavioral Segmentation

Moving beyond traditional demographic segmentation, more companies are adopting behavioral segmentation, grouping customers based on shared actions, preferences, or interactions. This approach enables more targeted marketing and product strategies.

3. Real-Time Data Analysis

With real-time analysis, businesses can respond to customer actions immediately, offering personalized experiences on the spot. Real-time analysis is particularly useful in e-commerce and customer support, where rapid responses can lead to higher conversion rates and improved satisfaction.

4. Omnichannel Behavior Tracking

As customers interact with brands across multiple channels—online, mobile, in-store—there’s a growing need for omnichannel behavior tracking. This provides a complete view of the customer journey, helping businesses maintain a cohesive experience regardless of where interactions occur.

5. Increased Focus on Data Ethics and Transparency

With rising customer concerns around privacy, businesses are focusing on data ethics, transparency, and control. Many are implementing practices that allow customers to understand, access, and control how their data is used, building trust and enhancing brand loyalty.

Improve Customer Behavior Analysis with InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience platform is the premier solution for customer behavior analysis. InMoment has been recognized as a leader in both AI and NLP. These solutions offer any business the ability to view comprehensive data about their customers’ behavior. See what InMoment can do for you by scheduling a demo today!

References 

HubSpot. Consumer Trends Report. (https://offers.hubspot.com/consumer-trends). Accessed 11/13/2024.

Social Listening Tools to Understand Customers & Improve Experiences

Listening to customers online can help you learn about current expectations and behavior. This proactive approach helps you deliver better customer service and gives you a competitive edge. A social listening tool simplifies the process of gathering and analyzing customer sentiment on social media.
Social Listening Solution

With 64% of Internet users discovering brands via social media, getting your marketing on point is essential. From simple reviews to detailed threads, there is a lot of online activity from individuals worldwide. Some of this activity could be relevant to your brand and industry. It could be an Instagram Story featuring your product or a post complaining about your recent update. Tracking these conversations with a social listening tool helps improve marketing efforts.

What to Look For in A Social Listening Tool? 

  1. Sentiment Analysis
  2. Competitor Analysis
  3. Multi-Platform Coverage
  4. Keyword and Hashtag Tracking
  5. Analytics and Reporting
  6. Content Creation and Scheduling
  7. CRM Integration

A social listening tool lets you tap into online conversations around your business. You can think of it as your eyes and ears on social media with the information it provides. From brand mentions to product discussions, you gain insight into customer sentiment to help make informed decisions.

The right social media listening tool will help you analyze customer behavior and competitors to stay ahead of the pack. Key features to look for include:

Sentiment Analysis

Identifying and monitoring the sentiment behind social media activity helps understand customer satisfaction. A good social listening tool leverages sentiment analysis to categorize your mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. This classification of public opinion gives you insight into your brand reputation.

Sentiment analysis also helps with effective customer service. For example, if you’re a pet food retailer, this analysis can highlight complaints about food quality. You can filter out all the negative mentions, allowing you to respond to them right away. This is crucial since responding to customer feedback within 24-48 hours boosts retention by 8.5%.

Therefore, sentiment analysis helps you understand your customers better to improve your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

You can’t have an edge over your competitors without identifying and analyzing them. What are their most popular offerings? What is the current public opinion around them? Is there an opportunity for you to differentiate or capitalize? A robust social listening tool should help you answer these questions.

Analyzing your competitors’ social media activity helps you keep up and move ahead. It enables you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can also find strategic opportunities to promote your brand.

For example, if you learn that your pet food competitor is receiving online criticism for late product deliveries, you can use that to your advantage. You can leverage social media campaigns and reviews to highlight how you never compromise on delivery times. This will help you emerge as a viable alternative to your competitors.

Multi-Platform Coverage

Online conversations happen across multiple platforms. From long threads on X (formerly Twitter) to an Instagram influencer’s comments, online interactions are multi-platform. As a result, social listening tools must cover multiple social media platforms to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable data.

Keyword and Hashtag Tracking

Keywords and hashtags enable you to track mentions of your brand and offerings on social media. They help cut through the noise and hone in on relevant conversations in your niche. 

Searching #petfood or #petcare on Instagram, for example, will help you uncover trending topics if your business is in that space. It can also help discover recurring complaints about products in your niche, enabling proactive issue resolution.

Analytics and Reporting

Effective social listening tools should offer analytics and reporting features that transform raw data into actionable insights. Analytics can show engagement trends and campaign performance. It also provides insight into how sentiment shifts over time so that brands can inform strategy.

Reporting tools allow you to present these insights to stakeholders in a clear manner. This guides businesses toward strategic decisions based on measurable data.

CRM Integration

Integrating social listening data with customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you build rich customer profiles. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage social media activity to identify its most valuable customers. These customers engage heavily with the brand’s social media content and recommend it to their networks. On the flip side, identifying disgruntled customers can help you focus on retaining them.

Best Social Listening Tool for Improving Customer Experience

A good social listening tool can help you make the most of your social media presence. Let’s look at some of the best tools in the market to help you enhance your social media management efforts.

InMoment

InMoment is your one-stop shop for tracking relevant conversations around your brand and analyzing them for informed decisions. It enables you to stay ahead of potential issues and proactively manage customer experiences.

With sentiment analysis and keyword tracking, InMoment helps you improve customer experience through a rich understanding of user personas. It helps you learn which features resonate the most or where you might need improvements. 

The software’s advanced monitoring tools also give you an edge by providing competitor insights that you can leverage. For example, if a competitor experiences a data breach, your CX and marketing teams can reinforce your brand’s commitment to security. This helps you appear as a trusted alternative to prospects.

Speaking of prospects, InMoment’s ability to track industry-relevant mentions is valuable for lead generation. Unlike other platforms, its XI Spotlight Tool lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook. This regular, real-time data analysis gives you the most accurate decision-making insights.

Social Listening Tools for Brand Awareness

  1. Hootsuite
  2. Meltwater
  3. Sprout Social
  4. Brandwatch
  5. Mentionlytics
  6. AgoraPulse
  7. Keyhole
  8. Brand24
  9. Buffer
  10. YouScan
  11. Digimind
  12. BuzzSumo
  13. TweetDeck

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite features social listening tools that use keywords and hashtags to track brand mentions. Its dashboard provides a centralized platform where you can easily monitor and respond to relevant social media activity. 

Key features include Streams and Insights, which support keyword monitoring and competitor analysis. Brands using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage its integration with InMoment to cultivate a positive online reputation,

2. Meltwater

Meltwater is social listening software designed to help businesses manage their online presence. It aggregates data from various sources, like social media, blogs, and forums. As a result, brands can monitor public sentiment and benchmark themselves against competitors. 

Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, historical data tracking, and influencer identification. Real-time alerts help businesses respond quickly to important events or potential crises. Additionally, Meltwater’s reporting tools help stakeholders visualize social media engagement.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a flexible tool that offers a wide range of features for social listening, analytics, and customer care. The platform allows users to track customer conversations on specific topics by creating custom queries. This makes it easier to stay informed about brand-related discussions.

A standout feature is the trend-identifying tool, which generates a word cloud to highlight frequently used terms in online conversations. This offers a quick snapshot of prominent topics to guide brands toward informed decisions.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch leverages social listening to gather relevant online interactions in one place. It pulls brand mentions from over 100 million sources to help businesses analyze historical and real-time conversations. 

Key features include a digital library for storing visual content and Focus Panels for digging deeper into demographics and behavior. It also offers multilingual support, which is ideal for businesses operating in multiple countries.

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics leverages AI to provide real-time tracking of brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across major social media platforms. Its robust reporting helps users make informed decisions for proactive engagement strategies. The tool also includes sentiment analysis in over 100 languages and competitor analysis to help brands keep up.

6. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse centralizes all social media conversations to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. Its Professional plan offers advanced brand monitoring, analytics reporting, and publishing capabilities across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. It also helps with content organization by letting you label key posts and customer feedback for easy access.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social listening tool that tracks brand mentions across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Its Team plan provides in-depth TikTok analytics, including competitor insights and data-driven recommendations. These recommendations cover optimal hashtags, video effects, and posting times for engagement. Keyhole’s tool is valuable for managing brand interactions on TikTok, where viral content can make a huge impact.

8. Brand24

Brand24’s tools measure brand awareness and reach, tracking conversations from 25 million online sources to provide insights into consumer sentiment. This information helps you identify what resonates with customers and any potential risks to your reputation.

9. Buffer

Buffer’s platform includes scheduling and publishing features for effective campaign planning. It integrates well with social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Additionally, Buffer’s analytics tools help monitor team performance by measuring engagement and audience behavior. However, the analytical and reporting features are available only on paid plans.

10. YouScan

YouScan is a social listening tool that leverages AI-powered image recognition to offer visual insights into consumer profiles. The platform’s capabilities allow for an in-depth understanding of brand sentiment and upcoming trends. This helps you tailor marketing strategies effectively. It also detects potential reputation threats in real-time to enable proactive management.

11. Digimind

Digimind provides competitive intelligence by turning social and online data into actionable insights. Its brand reputation dashboard helps in planning and analyzing marketing strategies effectively. As a result of its extensive data collection features, Digimind is a good fit for professionals who are well-versed in data analytics.

12. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive tool for content discovery and research. It helps users track trending topics and popular content across social media. With its monitoring features, brands can set up alerts for specific businesses, topics, and keywords to stay in the loop.

13. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool for tracking tweets around specific topics or breaking news. It also allows users to filter tweets from curated lists, which helps with monitoring relevant X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Its specific nature makes it ideal for individuals seeking a free method of narrowing down relevant X conversations. However, businesses might find it too limited for their purposes.

How Do Social Listening Tools Work?

Social listening tools provide access to online conversations around your business. These conversations could include comments, video reviews, or threads. Any piece of content mentioning your brand or product can offer key insights to you.

The software achieves this by searching for specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags on social media platforms. This results in a vast amount of data that is then analyzed for patterns, sentiment, and engagement metrics. 

Centralizing these insights in a dashboard allows brands to assess public opinion in real time. This method of feedback collection informs marketing strategies by identifying emerging trends and discussions. 

How to Use Social Listening Tools

You can leverage social listening tools to enhance brand reputation and deliver positive experiences. Popular applications of this technology include:

  • Brand Awareness: You learn how often and where your brand is mentioned to understand its reach and popularity. This information helps you optimize your marketing efforts to ensure you hit the right notes with the right people.
  • Customer Experience: The ability to track feedback and customer sentiment enables prompt issue resolution. As a result, you can enhance customer loyalty by adopting a proactive approach to customer service.
  • Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitor mentions to learn from their strengths and weaknesses. You can also identify opportunities for positioning yourself as a better alternative, which helps generate leads.
  • Product Development: Identify product-related feedback to gain insights into what customers want or areas needing improvement. It also helps identify popular feature requests that you might not have noticed through traditional feedback collection.
  • Crisis Management: Negative reviews spread like wildfire on the Internet. With a social listening tool, you can detect potential issues early and respond right away to minimize the negative impact.

How to Create A Social Listening Strategy

  1. Identify your goals
  2. Select relevant keywords
  3. Benchmark social media performance
  4. Analyze data
  5. Take action 

The right social listening strategy for your business depends on your goals and needs. The following steps provide a general blueprint for tracking and acting on online sentiment.

Identify Your Goals

Start by identifying your main goals. For example, if you want to improve customer service, you would want to track keywords related to service quality or product satisfaction. For competitor analysis, focus on tracking mentions of competitors’ products or issues.

Select Relevant Keywords

Speaking of keywords, it’s essential to choose the right ones to collect relevant data. Keywords can include your brand name, products, or industry terms. For competitor analysis, it would be helpful to search terms related to the competitor and their service.

Benchmark Social Media Performance

Once you have established your goals and keywords, you can start making the most of your social media presence. Establish benchmarks to gauge the success of your social listening efforts. Common metrics include sentiment scores, the volume of brand mentions, and the share of voice (SOV) compared to competitors. 

Analyze Data

Consistent analysis is key to spotting trends and improving key metrics. If certain features are frequently mentioned, look for patterns in sentiment to understand if you need to make changes. A social listening platform like InMoment’s XI Spotlight Tool can help by analyzing large volumes of data to unearth actionable insights for you.

Take Action 

Finally, with the insights in place, you can start taking the right actions to boost customer satisfaction. For example, if your analysis reveals a preference for certain features or products, it would be smart to prioritize them for now. Follow up with customers after implementing the changes to create a feedback loop for consistently excellent service.

What Can Social Listening Enable CX Leaders and Marketing Managers to Do?

Social listening empowers CX leaders and marketing managers to process customer sentiment for business gains. By monitoring real-time conversations, they can quickly identify and address customer concerns. This provides valuable data for enhancing the overall customer experience.

Social listening also enables them to track brand mentions. Did a social media influencer recently mention their brand? What are people saying about their products? Is there an opportunity to collaborate with popular individuals for brand promotion? Social listening answers these questions by highlighting trends and content that resonates so you can adjust strategies accordingly.

With insights from social listening, CX leaders can benchmark against competitors. They have access to relevant data that helps refine products and create targeted campaigns. As a result, they are better able to create campaigns that resonate with their audience and encourage stronger customer engagement.

Can Social Listening Help You Find Leads?

Yes, absolutely! Social listening can be an impactful lead-generation tool if you use the right software and techniques.

Monitoring keywords relevant to your products, services, or industry helps you identify user profiles that would be a good fit for your business. For example, if a user mentions in a post that they’re looking for software similar to yours, your team has an opportunity to reach out. By offering recommendations or support, you can position yourself as a business they can trust.

Social listening also lets you track competitor mentions. This analysis gives you a chance to attract customers who may be dissatisfied with other brands. Creating content around a specific feature in your software that a user can’t find anywhere else will boost your likelihood of converting them.

You can implement this strategic approach with a social listening platform like InMoment. Unlike other tools, InMoment’s XI Spotlight lets you control how frequently you pull data and analyzes it for you. It performs the analytical heavy lifting so that you can focus on effective actions for acquiring more customers.

How to Measure Social Listening

  • Mentions
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Engagement Metrics
  • Share of Voice
  • Geographic Insights
  • Trend Analysis
  • Business Metrics

You can measure the effectiveness of social listening efforts by tracking various metrics that reflect audience interaction and sentiment. Key metrics to track include:

Mentions

Track how often your brand, product, or related industry topics are mentioned on social media. This metric helps assess brand awareness and reach. InMoment’s social listening tools can streamline this process by monitoring relevant keywords and terms.

Sentiment Analysis

Analyze the tone of these mentions to understand how audiences feel about your brand. You can categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. This information is key for brand reputation management efforts as it highlights the dominant public feeling towards you.

Engagement Metrics

Monitor the number of likes, shares, and comments to assess engagement levels with your brand. Likes reflect the lowest level of engagement and suggest overall approval of your content. Comments provide more context and highlight individuals taking a deeper interest in your brand. It also helps identify specific demographics that interact the most with your brand.

Share of Voice

Measure your brand’s presence relative to competitors. This metric helps you understand your position in the market and how often you’re mentioned compared to others. 

By tracking engagement metrics, InMoment’s competitive analysis tools can highlight if your target audience engages with you more than your competition. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement in your marketing campaigns.

Geographic Insights

Identify regional variations in brand perception. Measuring this metric provides insight into location-specific strategies and regional customer sentiment. For example, it helps you focus on regions exhibiting greater overall dissatisfaction.

Trend Analysis

Analyze shifts in customer sentiment or recurring themes over time. This metric helps you spot emerging trends and anticipate changing customer preferences. 

For example, if a relevant issue becomes a hot topic of discussion online, you can leverage it to generate interest in your brand. InMoment’s social media monitoring tools help you stay on top of trends by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags.

Business Metrics

Assess the business impact of social listening efforts. Tracking metrics like customer growth, regional sales, and conversion rate helps you confirm the value of your social media strategy. It also highlights room for improvement, enabling you to tweak processes and adapt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Social listening provides real-time data on your brand, customers, and competitors. It’s a powerful tool for gaining industry insights to consistently improve your business. If you are curious to learn more, here are answers to some of the most common questions:

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking relevant keywords, topics, and conversations across your social media channels. It helps you monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment to determine public opinion around your business. You can leverage this technique to keep tabs on customer behavior, analyze competitors, and generate leads.

What’s the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is a reactive strategy that looks at comments and conversations directly related to your brand. It provides an opportunity to respond to feedback on your specific business or product to retain and satisfy customers.

Social listening is a proactive approach that takes monitoring a step further. It tracks all the conversations relevant to your industry, including those around your competitors, to understand customer sentiment and expectations. It helps you keep up with potential issues and trends to provide better overall customer experiences.

For example, monitoring tells you that a customer is complaining about your product quality on a Facebook post. Listening tells you why this particular complaint is popular nowadays and how you can address it better than your competition.

How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

Social media listening increases customer advocacy by showing customers that you care. It provides a proactive approach to resolving issues and fulfilling expectations. For example, listening enables you to add trendy features or address potential issues before they arise. 

These actions enhance satisfaction and convert customers into loyal advocates for your brand. You can monitor their advocacy by tracking the volume of mentions you get from them on social media channels.

Learn More About InMoment’s Social Listening Tool

Social media listening enables you to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It unlocks opportunities for improvement and moving ahead of your competition. With InMoment’s social listening tool, you can track every piece of relevant content online to stay on top of trends, potential risks, and customer preferences. Take a product tour today to see if it’s the right fit for your brand monitoring needs!

References 

Smart Insights. Global social media statistics research summary May 2024 (https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research). Accessed 11/06/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/06/2024.

Churn Prediction: How to Predict It for Customer Retention

Customers leave a business for several reasons, from poor support to lack of personalization. Churn prediction helps you identify key drivers of churn and accurately detect clients likely to leave your business. This enables you to take proactive action to retain and satisfy customers.
Customer Churn Prediction

Did you know that U.S. companies could save over $35 billion annually by satisfying existing customers? Understanding why customers want to leave can help you retain them and reduce acquisition costs. But, how do you identify customers at risk of leaving? You could guess based on their activity, but that would be ineffective. Instead, you need to leverage churn prediction to learn why customers may leave and what you can do about it.

What is Churn Prediction?

Churn prediction detects which customers are likely to discontinue business with you. This churn could occur as a canceled subscription or product abandonment. There are several types of churn you can predict, including:

  • Customer churn is the most familiar type of churn. Customer churn focuses on the specific decline in the number of customers instead of revenue alone.
  • Revenue churn represents the loss of revenue due to customers downgrading their plans or leaving the business altogether.
  • Active churn is when customers cancel their service and communicate their decision to the business.
  • Passive churn occurs when customers don’t explicitly cancel their service. However, they haven’t attempted to renew it either. For example, a subscription that ends without renewal or communication from the subscriber.
  • Voluntary churn is when customers actively decide to stop using a service or product. This decision can be due to dissatisfaction, finding a better alternative, or changing requirements.
  • Involuntary churn occurs against the customer’s will. It’s usually a result of payment issues, like credit card expirations or insufficient funds. It doesn’t represent a problem with customer satisfaction, but it indicates that you could improve your payment processor or methods.

Why is Customer Churn Prediction Important?

Predicting churn in any form is key to customer retention and satisfaction. It is important for businesses because:

  • It helps retain customers. Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining current ones. Proactively monitoring customer health can help businesses cut churn by over 34% for at-risk clients.
  • It informs effective marketing strategy. Churn prediction helps you tailor your marketing efforts to re-engage customers at risk of leaving. For example, you can send gift cards to at-risk customers after their next purchase.
  • It enhances customer satisfaction. Modelling churn helps you understand why customers want to leave. It provides rich insight into specific pain points. This will help you better understand and serve customers.
  • It supports long-term growth. Lowering the churn rate contributes to a stronger, more loyal customer base. This creates a foundation for sustainable growth, enabling you to fulfill key business goals.
  • It provides a competitive advantage. With insights into customer behavior, you can act faster and smarter than competitors. With effective customer experience management, you can re-engage customers who might otherwise be lost to your competition.

A good example of the importance of reducing customer churn comes from nib New Zealand. Through its partnership with InMoment, nib rolled out a closed-loop feedback process to improve the customer experience. InMoment’s churn propensity modeling was crucial to identifying and retaining customers showing signs of dissatisfaction. As a result, nib improved its NPS and reduced churn by 6% within six months of rolling out the program. To learn more, download the full story below!

How to Predict Customer Churn?

To predict customer churn, you need to know how to model it. A data scientist can achieve this by building a machine learning prediction model trained on a dataset. This dataset includes the target variable you want to predict (customer churn) and features that describe customer profiles.

InMoment’s data analysis capabilities give you the power to automatically sort through your customer feedback data and detect sentiments such as intent to churn. Using these insights, you can create actionable customer segments based on customer behavior data. 

Customer churn analysis charts.

Here are the key steps for using data analysis to predict churn:

  1. Collect and Prepare Data
  2. Select and Train a Model
  3. Analyze Predictive Patterns
  4. Take Proactive Action

Collect and Prepare Data

Consider diverse data sources that capture customer interactions and behaviors. This can include CRM data, social media, call center logs, service requests, and chat messages. 

Pulling unstructured data from different sources helps you build a comprehensive dataset covering every touchpoint in the customer journey.

The next step is to clean and preprocess the data to ensure consistency. This includes removing duplicate entries and standardizing formats. For example, different sources may record customer names in different formats. Standardizing the format will help ensure clarity.

Identifying the most relevant features for churn prediction helps improve model accuracy. For example, someone’s name isn’t a good indicator of whether they will churn. However, their transaction frequency or last purchase date are stronger indicators. Including these features would help you prepare high-quality data for reliable predictions.

Select and Train a Model

Select a machine learning model that best fits your data and business goals. Logistic regression algorithms are ideal as they can predict a binary outcome (churn or not) based on volumes of historical data.

The next step is to feed the labeled data to the model to train it. During the training phase, the model detects patterns in customer activity to understand why churn happens. For example, low engagement or transaction frequency will likely be true for most churn cases.

Training is an iterative process. Evaluate the model’s performance on test data to see how well it predicts churn. A data scientist might also tweak the model or choose additional features to improve predictive power.

The last step is to validate the model with new data to ensure it generalizes well. This will help confirm the model’s ability to forecast new churn cases accurately.

Analyze Predictive Patterns

A trained model can reveal predictive patterns leading to customer churn. For example, a drop in purchase frequency, low engagement with customer support, or consistently negative feedback indicates churn likelihood.

Begin by analyzing key indicators within your model’s output. Look at variables like purchase recency, CSAT (customer satisfaction score), and interaction frequency. This will help identify common attributes among churned customers. Identifying these patterns helps you understand the specific reasons customers might leave.

A good practice is to break down these patterns by customer segments. For example, younger customers might churn due to a lack of personalization. High-value customers might leave because of pricing concerns. Categorizing insights by customer segments helps create targeted retention strategies for each demographic.

Take Proactive Action

This step involves acting on the churn predictions to engage at-risk customers before it’s too late.

Proactive actions can include personalized outreach addressing specific concerns. For example, you can send them special offers or product recommendations to reignite their interest. High-value customers might benefit from loyalty rewards or exclusive access to new features. These steps will help make customers feel valued and appreciated.

If certain offers or messages reduce churn, incorporate these strategies into a long-term retention plan. Acting on churn predictions highlights your commitment to customer satisfaction. The resulting customer loyalty is key to stronger relationships and business growth.

What Are the Challenges of Predicting Customer Churn?

  1. Inaccurate Model Predictions 
  2. Identifying the Right Features
  3. Collecting High-Quality Data
  4. Data Integration
  5. Changing Customer Behaviors
  6. Transforming Insights into Action

Predicting customer churn is valuable for customer retention. However, it can be tricky to navigate. Some common challenges businesses face include:

Inaccurate Model Predictions

Accurate model predictions require careful data analysis and calibration. Without proper testing and validation, a model is likely to produce inaccurate predictions. For example, if it overfits the training data, it won’t be able to make accurate predictions on new data. Regular testing and refinement are time-consuming but crucial for improving model accuracy.

Identifying the Right Features

Selecting the right features is important for building an effective churn prediction model. Irrelevant features can add noise to the dataset and confuse the model. Similarly, overlooking impactful features makes it difficult to understand the true drivers of churn. Data scientists often need to experiment with different features to identify the ones most relevant to churn.

Collecting High-Quality Data

Data quality is a key component in churn prediction. Incomplete or low-quality data can skew results and lead to unreliable predictions. 

Data Integration

One of the biggest challenges is integrating large volumes of customer data from various sources. A CX platform like InMoment can help by collecting and connecting every piece of valuable data in one place. This effective integration helps build cohesive, model-ready datasets for churn prediction. 

Data sources from different integrations being combined to provide a better customer experience.

Changing Customer Behaviors

Customer needs and behaviors evolve. As a result, attributes responsible for churn last year might not necessarily be relevant today. Businesses must regularly update their models based on customer behavior analysis to reflect changing customer expectations. The continuous monitoring and adjustment require considerable time and effort.

Transforming Insights into Action

Once you identify at-risk customers, you must act on the predictive insights to re-engage customers. This might include personalized offers, targeted communication, or enhanced customer support. Creating these strategies and making them effective can be challenging.

What Are the Benefits of Predicting Customer Churn?

Predicting customer churn is a worthy investment despite the challenges. Businesses can expect to realize the following benefits:

  • It reduces customer acquisition costs. Acquiring new customers is difficult and costly. Identifying at-risk customers early enables businesses to re-engage them with tailored incentives. As a result, you spend less on acquiring new clients to help your business thrive.
  • It improves customer relationships. Predictive insights highlight what matters to your customers. This information helps you refine retention strategies to keep clients on board. For example, offering proactive customer support or loyalty rewards helps retain customers by showing them you care.
  • It provides stronger customer insights. Patterns in churn data provide insight into customer satisfaction. It helps you understand different customer segments better. These insights help improve messaging and engagement efforts for both retention and acquisition. 
  • It enables business growth and stability. Repeat customers spend 67% more than new clients. As a result, retaining more customers helps maintain a stable revenue stream. This contributes to consistent business growth and innovation.
  • It provides a competitive advantage. At-risk customers are considering alternative businesses. Churn prediction improves your chances of retaining them and maintaining your competitive edge. It also informs strategies that better meet customer needs, reducing their chances of choosing competitors.

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s VoC tools.

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How to Choose Churn Prediction Software?

The right churn prediction software does the predictive heavy lifting so that you can focus on improving customer relationships. Key features to look for include:

Data Integration

Building a comprehensive dataset involves pulling customer data from diverse sources. These sources can include CRM systems, customer feedback questionnaires, and social media. The right software should be adept at integrating every single data point for effective model training.

InMoment simplifies this process by connecting customer signals from each relevant source into a single place for analysis. The accuracy and reliability of its data integration help produce complete datasets.

Advanced Text Analytics

Your churn prediction platform should be able to analyze customer feedback. This helps uncover customer sentiment and identify churn indicators.

InMoment’s text analysis software helps you proactively uncover what a customer intends to do next. It leverages advanced AI to process feedback and highlight customer intent. The intent appears as a complaint, praise, suggestion, inquiry, purchase, will return, comparison, requested help, recommend, not recommend, and churn. Instead of a simple binary outcome, you get more context into the customer’s expectations!

Text analysis software in InMoment's platform analyzing the review left by a customer.

Customizable Alerts

Look for tools that enable you to set alerts for at-risk customers. These customer experience automation features make it easier to respond to customers quickly, improving your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

The right tool should offer competitor insights to help you understand churn in the market context. For example, do customers have a better alternative in mind? If so, what can you offer them to sway them away from the competition?

InMoment’s competitor analysis software helps you stay up-to-date on your competition. Besides identifying competitors, it lets you see how you rank against them. You can also set alerts for performance changes. This helps identify opportunities to fulfill customer needs better for retention.

Actionable Reporting

A good platform helps you visualize predictive insights. Dashboards and competitive reports make it easier for teams to understand and respond to churn patterns.

With InMoment’s reporting capabilities, you can easily build customizable reports and share them across your organization. It enables you to prioritize features that will improve your chances of engaging at-risk customers.

Custom built CX dashboards and reports in InMoment's XI Platform.

How InMoment Can Help with Churn Prediction and Reduce Customer Churn

Churn prediction is key to improving relationships, reducing acquisition costs, and increasing profits. InMoment offers a comprehensive approach to churn prediction that enables businesses to take proactive steps for customer retention. It processes volumes of unstructured data with the help of machine learning and text analysis to accurately identify churn drivers. Take a look at our text analytics solutions today and see how they can help reduce churn rates!

References 

Semrush. 65 Customer Retention Statistics You Need to Know in 2024 (https://www.semrush.com/blog/customer-retention-stats). Accessed 11/07/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/07/2024.

How Social Media Monitoring Can Impact Your Business

Social media monitoring is how an organization stays connected with what customers, consumers, and competitors are discussing on social media platforms and using that knowledge to make informed business decisions and build stronger relationships.
Happy friends using mobile smart phones outdoors

Did you know consumers ranked social media in the top five most preferred channels for customer support? Furthermore, more than 80% of consumers expect a response from businesses on social media within two business days. With these customer expectations in mind, having a robust social media monitoring strategy that helps you stay connected with your customers has never been more important for maintaining a positive customer experience

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the practice of actively tracking, analyzing, and responding to online mentions of a brand, product, or topic across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media monitoring is part of comprehensive social media management

When an organization is tuned in to social media conversations, it gives them insights that influence everything from customer service protocols to marketing strategies and product updates. 

Social Media Monitoring vs Social Listening

  • Social media monitoring is reactive to certain mentions, reviews, or posts made by customers. Social media monitoring is the base that social listening is built on. 
  • Social listening is a proactive strategy that uses social media data to uncover customer insights and make broader business decisions. 

While often used together in conversation, social media monitoring differs greatly from social listening. Both involve tracking online conversations, however, social media monitoring focuses on immediate action and responding in real-time, making it useful for handling customer inquiries or managing problems as they happen. 

Conversely, social listening identifies larger trends and themes through audience analysis, competitive intelligence, and customer sentiment tracking. This helps organizations understand the bigger picture behind consumer behavior and market performance. 

Why Is Social Media Monitoring Important

Social media monitoring is important because 88% of consumers expect a response from an organization on social media within two business days. Furthermore, 76% of consumers are frustrated when they do not get personalized communication from a business. By leveraging tools to monitor social media, you can improve your response time with customers and offer them a more personalized experience. 

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

When brands consistently track and analyze social media mentions, they can use those findings to assist their brand reputation management efforts, improve the customer experience, and capitalize on market insights. Here are some other key benefits of social media monitoring:

  • Enhanced brand awareness
  • Improved customer engagement
  • Effective crisis management
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Informed Market Research

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Social media monitoring allows brands to gauge their visibility across channels and understand how their audience perceives them. By tracking your brand mentions specifically, you can assess the reach and tone of conversations you are part of. This helps you stay connected with how consumers view your brand. This level of awareness ensures that your brand can strategically build and maintain a positive image. In fact, 83% of marketers say their social media monitoring efforts have increased their brand exposure. 

Improved Customer Engagement

Properly responding to customer questions, complaints, or compliments can significantly impact customer loyalty. Social media monitoring enables your organization to identify and engage with your audience at crucial moments, such as when a customer leaves a bad review after a negative shopping experience. A quick response time shows that your brand is attentive and responsive and builds stronger customer relationships. 

Effective Crisis Management

Social media monitoring can be the difference between a quickly resolved emergency and a crisis that destroys your brand image. With social media monitoring tools, your organization can identify emerging problems and spikes in mentions, such as a viral post of a customer detailing poor customer service they experienced with your brand. When you can identify these issues early, you can address them before they escalate. 

Social media monitoring also makes it easy to communicate with your entire customer base in a crisis. A pre-planned crisis management strategy can make crisis management easier through social media monitoring tools.

Competitive Analysis

Social media monitoring tools do not only monitor mentions of your organization. They can also monitor chosen keywords such as product names, industry buzzwords, or names of your competitors. By monitoring industry-related conversations, you gain insight into competitors’ strategies, market gaps, and your current brand equity. This information is invaluable for helping your brand stand out in the market. 

Informed Market Research

As mentioned earlier, social media monitoring is the foundation of social listening. That means that social media monitoring can be the filtering system for what is explored more in-depth with social listening. By tracking which topics are being mentioned frequently, you can identify this as a trend that can be further explored with social listening tools. 

Who Should Use Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring can be useful to any CX teams or similar groups within your organization that rely on customer sentiment, engagement, and overall brand presence. For these teams, social media monitoring can improve strategies and influence business objectives. Here is a closer look at who can benefit from using social media monitoring:

  1. Marketing and Brand Managers
  2. Customer Service Teams
  3. PR Professionals
  4. Sales Teams
  5. Product Development Teams

1. Marketing and Brand Managers

Marketing teams can use social media monitoring tools to understand the reach, sentiment, and engagement around campaigns and brand mentions. Using this insight, they can change their messaging, identify successful content, and maintain brand consistency across social platforms. 

2. Customer Service Teams

Social media is now in the top five most preferred channels for customer service. Customer service teams that monitor social media channels can promptly address inquiries, resolve issues, and manage complaints. 

3. Public Relations (PR) Professionals

PR teams must maintain a positive public image and handle any issues before they develop into a crisis. Social media monitoring helps them stay attuned to public opinion and track the success of PR campaigns. By catching negative mentions early, PR teams can proactively address concerns, manage rumors, and prevent reputation damage.

4. Sales Teams

Social media monitoring can help sales teams identify leads and better understand customer needs and preferences. Monitoring industry trends and tracking potential customers’ pain points can give sales teams an edge in personalizing pitches and addressing the most relevant concerns. This data-driven approach can improve the quality of their outreach and boost conversion rates.

5. Product Development Teams

Social media is a valuable source of customer feedback. Users frequently share experiences, pain points, and feature requests. Product teams can analyze this feedback to improve products, add new features, or create new offerings that align with customer needs. Social media monitoring provides real-world insights that complement other sources of product data.

Key Metrics for Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is more than scanning through unstructured data. There are quantifiable metrics that can help you track the status and progress of your social media monitoring efforts. Here are some essential metrics to focus on: 

  • Brand Mentions
  • Customer Sentiment
  • Share of Voice
  • Engagement Metrics
  • Topic and Keyword Trends

Brand Mentions

In order to understand your brand visibility and relevance, it is crucial to monitor the number and context of brand mentions. Tracking when, where, and how often people mention your brand gives insight into your reach and presence across social platforms. By analyzing both direct and indirect mentions (variations of your brand name or common misspellings), you can be sure that you are capturing the full scope of brand-related conversations. 

Additional Tip: You should also monitor the brand mentions for your top competitors. Monitoring competitor mentions gives you insight into the conversations they are a part of. This can be a great advantage for your organization as you can identify your competitors strengths and weaknesses as they are reported on by customers or third-party organizations. 

InMoment’s platform gives you the ability to track your competitors’ mentions as well as compare your organization beside them. When you identify and track competitors with InMoment, you can also see how you both compare for industry-related keywords. 

Competitor comparison showing the performances of two businesses for the same keyword.

Customer Sentiment 

Customer sentiment analysis measures the emotional tone behind social media mentions. This metric provides insight into how people feel about your brand and whether the sentiment changes over time. 

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics, including likes, comments, shares, and retweets, reveal how actively users interact with your content. Tracking engagement metrics on posts mentioning your brand helps you identify which content types and topics resonate most with your audience. 

Topic and Keyword Trends

Staying on top of relevant topics, keywords, and hashtags in your industry helps you tap into conversations that matter most to your audience. By monitoring trending topics, you can align your content with current interests, join popular discussions, and ensure your messaging remains relevant. 

Tools for Social Media Monitoring

Selecting the right social media monitoring tool can streamline the process of tracking brand mentions, analyzing customer behavior, and staying responsive to your audience. Here are some popular tools for social media monitoring: 

  1. InMoment
  2. Sprout Social
  3. Mention
  4. Brandwatch
  5. Agorapulse

1. InMoment

InMoment includes a comprehensive social media management tool through a Hootsuite partnership. This tool includes monitoring, scheduling, and analytics capabilities that allows brands to track keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions across multiple platforms in real time. 

Its analytics dashboard also allows users to gauge engagement, sentiment, and campaign performance. It is an all-in-one solution for businesses that want to manage content and monitoring from a single platform.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is known for its robust analytics and customer engagement tools. It enables brands to monitor mentions and keywords, assess audience sentiment, and manage interactions through a unified inbox. Sprout Social’s reporting features provide valuable insights into brand health, competitive positioning, and audience engagement trends, making it particularly useful for teams focused on data-driven strategies.

3. Mention

Mention offers a straightforward, user-friendly solution for tracking brand mentions, competitor analysis, and sentiment. With Mention, users can set up custom alerts for keywords and topics and receive real-time updates, helping brands stay proactive in responding to mentions and trends. This tool is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that want efficient monitoring without complex features.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch specializes in social listening and analytics, providing powerful tools for analyzing customer sentiment and market trends. Its AI-powered analytics offer in-depth insights into brand perception and competitor activity. Brandwatch is well-suited for businesses that need advanced data analytics, sentiment analysis, and trend tracking to stay competitive in their industry.

5. Agorapulse

Agorapulse combines social media management with monitoring, allowing brands to track mentions and keywords while scheduling content and engaging with their audience. Its social inbox is ideal for teams that manage multiple accounts, as it centralizes interactions from various platforms. Agorapulse’s analytics reports also help users evaluate engagement and sentiment, making it a practical choice for mid-sized businesses looking for a mix of functionality.

Key Features for Social Media Monitoring Platforms

Social media monitoring tools can vary in functionality based on the use cases for which they are built. However, there are certain core features that every effective social media monitoring tool will have. Here are some of the most popular features to look out for as you choose a social media monitoring tool: 

Real-Time Alerts

Ensure your chosen tool can deliver real-time notifications for brand mentions and tracked keywords. This improves your response time and is especially useful for time-sensitive situations such as handling customer complaints and spotting trending topics. 

Through InMoment’s platform, you can respond to customers quickly by setting up customizable alerts for reviews and social media mentions. Also, you can manage the workload by assigning specific tasks to team members in the platform. 

Sentiment Analysis

Understanding the tone of social media mentions can help you gauge overall customer sentiment and track how it changes over time. Sentiment analysis provides insights into whether conversations around your brand are positive, negative, or neutral. 

InMoment’s sentiment analysis is driven by award-winning text analysis software that gives you the most accurate reporting and lets you dive deeper into intent, perceived effort, and emotion hidden in feedback so you can craft the best response. 

A sentiment analysis dashboard categorizing trending keywords by sentiment.

Cross-Platform integration

With social conversations happening on multiple platforms, it is important to have a tool that pulls data from all relevant social networks to capture a comprehensive view of your brand’s digital presence. You want to choose a tool that integrates with all major platforms, such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as review sites such as Google and Yelp. 

If your team uses other platforms, such as a CRM, marketing automation software, or customer support tool, look for social media monitoring tools that can integrate seamlessly to consolidate data and streamline workflows.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding what’s happening with competitors provides valuable context for your brand’s performance and helps identify gaps or opportunities within your industry. Monitoring competitors’ social media presence, engagement levels, and customer sentiment lets you stay ahead and make more strategic decisions.

Choose tools that allow you to set up competitor tracking with customizable comparisons, share-of-voice analysis, and benchmarking features. Some tools can also analyze competitors’ content to reveal which topics and formats resonate most with their audience. 

Reporting and Analytics

Detailed, customizable reporting and analytics simplify tracking performance over time, measuring campaign success, and sharing insights with key stakeholders. Strong reporting features make it easier to turn social media data into actionable insights that support strategic decision-making.

How to Implement A Social Media Monitoring Strategy

Implementing an effective social media monitoring strategy requires a structured approach to make sure your organization is tracking the right data to make the best decisions. Here are the key steps to setting up a successful social media monitoring strategy: 

  1. Define Your Goals
  2. Identify Key Metrics
  3. Choose the Right Tools
  4. Set Up Alerts and Track Keywords
  5. Establish a Response Protocol
  6. Analyze and Report

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Start by identifying your main objectives. Whether it’s improving customer service, managing brand reputation, tracking competitors, or gauging campaign performance, knowing your goals will help you focus on the most relevant metrics and guide your monitoring efforts effectively.

Step 2: Identify Key Metrics

Based on your goals, choose the key metrics to track, such as brand mentions, sentiment, engagement, or share of voice. You may want to consider choosing social media metrics that can correspond with KPIs in customer experience. Defining the best metrics to track first will help you better track success over time. 

Step 3: Choose the Right Tools

Once you have outlined goals and defined the most important metrics for your team, select a social media monitoring tool that aligns with your needs, team size, and budget. Look for features that will support your specific goals, like real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, competitor tracking, and customizable dashboards.

Step 4: Set Up Alerts and Track Keywords

Configure alerts for brand mentions, industry-related keywords, competitors, and any hashtags relevant to your brand. Real-time alerts help you stay responsive to important developments and engage promptly with customers and followers.

Step 5: Establish a Response Protocol

Create a protocol for responding to different mentions, such as positive feedback, complaints, or potential crises. Define who will respond to each type of interaction, the preferred tone and style, and a timeline for response. Having a clear plan helps teams remain consistent and proactive in customer interactions.

Step 6: Analyze and Report on Insights

Review the data regularly to assess performance, monitor sentiment trends, and identify recurring issues or customer preferences. Share insights with relevant teams, such as marketing, product development, and customer support, to inform decision-making across the organization.

Common Challenges in Social Media Monitoring

While social media monitoring is an extremely important part of efforts to improve customer experience in your organization, it comes with its own set of challenges. Here is a look at some common obstacles and practical solutions to overcome them:

Information Overload

  • Problem: Social media platforms generate an overwhelming amount of data daily, and trying to monitor every mention can be exhausting and counterproductive.
  • Solution: Focus on the metrics and keywords that align directly with your goals. Set up filters to prioritize mentions based on relevance, sentiment, or source, and consider creating tiered alerts that notify you only of high-priority mentions. Using tools with AI-powered analytics can also help in sorting and analyzing large volumes of data effectively.

Detecting Nuanced Sentiment

  • Problem: Automated sentiment analysis often struggles to detect sarcasm, humor, or subtle tones, leading to inaccurate readings of customer sentiment.
  • Solution: Consider using monitoring tools with advanced AI capabilities or natural language processing (NLP) to improve sentiment accuracy. For high-stakes conversations, rely on manual review or human oversight to ensure nuanced messages are correctly understood.

Cross-Platform Consistency

  • Problem: Different social media platforms vary in user demographics, content style, and engagement norms, making it difficult to maintain consistent monitoring across channels.
  • Solution: Use a tool that integrates multiple platforms into one dashboard, making it easier to monitor and compare across channels. Create platform-specific monitoring criteria to adapt to the nuances of each social network, ensuring that your approach is relevant and effective.

Start Social Media Monitoring with InMoment

InMoment’s social media monitoring solution through Hootsuite, paired with an award-winning customer experience platform, gives organizations all the tools they need to create a consistent customer experience that keeps customers coming back. See what InMoment can do for you by scheduling a demo today!

References 

HubSpot. 2024 HubSpot State of Service. (https://offers.hubspot.com/state-of-customer-service). Accessed 11/4/2024. 

Mckinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 11/4/2024. 

Social Media Examiner. 2024 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. (https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2024/). Accessed 11/4/2024. 

Sprout Social. Sprout Social Index Report 2023. (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/index/). Accessed 11/4/2024.

How Customer Experience Automation Can Improve Business Performance

Customer experience automation is the process of automating touchpoints in the customer journey. This improves the customer experience while also giving your team more time to focus on complex customer cases.
Handsome mid-adult man picking up his package from an electronic parcel locker using his smart phone.

Did you know that 92% of customer relationship management (CRM) leaders say AI and automation have improved customer service response times? Furthermore, 86% of those leaders also agree that AI and automation have helped them scale their operations, with the majority believing those tools are more effective for scaling operations than hiring more customer service representatives. 

What is Customer Experience Automation?

Customer experience automation refers to automating interactions or touchpoints throughout the customer journey. This can be done using tools such as AI, natural language processing (NLP), and automated workflows. Customer experience automation allows organizations to connect with customers in a relevant, timely, and personalized way without extra manual input. 

Why is Customer Experience Automation Important?

Customer experience automation is so important because 99% of service professionals at organizations who use it say that it allows them to focus on individual customers. Furthermore, an average of 90% of professionals in an organization investing in AI and automation say that it has helped reduce service costs. 

Implementing customer experience automation as a regular part of your operations can help you improve business performance by cutting out the time usually needed for routine tasks and reinvesting that time in more complex customer issues, ultimately resulting in a better customer experience

Benefits of Customer Experience Automation

The benefits of customer experience automation include: 

  • Enhanced efficiency
  • Scalability 
  • Improved personalization 
  • Data-driven decision making

Enhanced Efficiency

Customer experience automation can reduce the workload on customer service teams by automating repetitive tasks. This allows them to focus on complex issues that require a human touch. Of the 81% of organizations automating workflow processes, 98% report that reducing errors is a major or minor benefit of customer experience automation. 

Scalability

Customer experience automation systems can handle high columns of interactions simultaneously. This is useful for organizations managing an expanding customer base as their business grows. In fact, 91% of service professionals at organizations using automation have time to take on new projects due to customer experience automation. 

Improved Personalization 

While some may believe that automating certain touchpoints creates a similar, stale experience for every customer, the opposite is true. Over 80% of CRM leaders say that AI and automation make customer communication more personalized. Customer experience automation allows organizations to personalize more interactions based on customer data, creating an experience that is more relevant and memorable to the user. 

Data-Driven Insights

Customer experience automation software can analyze automated interactions to provide insights into common customer preferences, behaviors, and pain points. Organizations that invest in AI and automation report that it has helped them better serve customers. 

The Four Pillars of Customer Experience Automation

The four pillars of customer experience automation, originally developed by Gartner as the four pillars of customer service, represent the most important building blocks of customer experience automation and guide how it can be achieved. The four pillars are: 

  1. Orchestration
  2. Segmentation
  3. Personalization
  4. Automation

1. Orchestration

The first pillar of customer experience of automation is orchestration. Orchestration refers to creating a cohesive and smooth customer journey. You want to ensure that interactions, whether from emails, SMS messages, chatbots, live support, or any other channel, are connected and tested before the user encounters them. 

2. Segmentation

Segmentation in customer experience automation leverages customer data to group customers by behavior, preferences, or demographics. This enables more relevant and targeted communication. 

3. Personalization

Personalized experiences are more than addressing customers by name. Customer experience automation can use customer data to understand purchase history and interests to craft messages that resonate with individual customers. 

4. Automation 

The automation pillar of customer experience automation refers to tactically scheduling, triggering, and handling responses based on customer interactions. This allows your brand to keep up with customer expectations 24/7. 

Who Uses Customer Experience Automation

Various teams can use customer experience automation to accomplish different goals. Regardless of where the CX team may live in your organization, there is a place where customer experience automation can improve your performance. Here are some examples of how different teams can use and benefit from customer experience automation:

  • Marketing teams
  • Sales teams
  • Customer support teams
  • Product teams
  • Operations teams

Marketing Teams

By leveraging customer experience automation, marketing teams can deliver highly personalized campaigns, segment audiences, and engage customers with relevant messaging. Setting up automated journeys, such as welcome emails and post-purchase follow-ups, helps increase engagement and build stronger customer relationships. 

Sales Teams

Through automated, data-driven triggers, sales teams can leverage customer experience automation to interact with leads at the right moments. Using customer experience automation tools throughout the sales process, sales teams can nurture leads more effectively and close deals faster. 

Customer Support Teams

Customer experience automation allows frontline customer support teams to automate responses to common inquiries, route tickets to the right agents, and send proactive updates. This reduces response times and allows support teams to focus on complex issues. 

Product Teams

With customer experience automation, product teams can collect customer feedback, analyze customer usage patterns, and identify pain points in real time. This data-driven approach can help product teams make more informed decisions about future product features and communications.

Operations Teams

Operations teams can use customer experience automation to streamline workflows, automate data collection, and ensure consistent service delivery. From order tracking to post-purchase surveys, customer experience automation tools help operations teams optimize processes and improve efficiency.

How to Use Customer Experience Automation

Here is a quick overview of how to use customer experience automation to improve the customer journey at your organization: 

  1. Map and Examine the Customer Journey
  2. Integrate Data
  3. Create Segments and Triggers
  4. Personalize at Scale
  5. Monitor and Optimize

1. Map and Examine the Customer Journey

If you haven’t already, you must create a customer journey map with a high-level view of the end-to-end customer experience. Once completed, you must identify the touchpoints that can be improved through customer experience automation. These touchpoints could include onboarding, feedback requests, or follow-ups. 

2. Integrate Data

To effectively use customer experience automation tools, you must integrate your customer experience automation platform with your organization’s other systems. This means connecting your customer experience automation platform with CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and any other data sources that provide insights into the customer experience. 

3. Create Segments and Triggers

You can create customer segments based on behaviors, demographics, and other criteria, such as purchase history or engagement level. Customer segments help you organize your customers into meaningful groups for targeted interactions.

Then, you will want to create automated triggers for each segment. Triggers prompt automated responses, such as sending a thank you email after a purchase, offering a discount to customers who haven’t engaged recently, or delivering relevant content after someone attends a webinar. Triggers allow you to respond promptly and deliver the right message at the right moment to increase engagement and conversions. 

Setting up automated workflows in InMoment's XI platform.

4. Personalize at Scale

Once you have this in place, you can fully implement your customer experience automation solution. Customer experience automation allows you to provide a high level of personalization for hundreds or thousands of customers simultaneously. At scale, this will improve your overall satisfaction and customer loyalty

5. Monitor and Optimize

Continuously track the performance of customer experience automation strategies to refine and improve customer interactions over time. You can track this by monitoring pre-selected customer experience metrics to identify trends, understand customer preferences, and detect any drop-offs in the automated journey. 

This data can be used to refine triggers, update personalization parameters, and adjust your customer segments. For example, if a triggered email isn’t generating clicks, it may need more compelling content or a different call-to-action.

Customer Experience Automation Examples

Here are some industry-specific examples of customer experience automation: 

  • E-commerce: Automated cart abandonment emails that include a personalized discount, encouraging customers to complete their purchases.
  • Financial Services: Proactive notifications alert customers to unusual account activity or personalized tips to improve financial wellness.
  • Healthcare: Automated appointment reminders or follow-up messages post-visit, ensuring patients feel cared for and valued.
  • Hospitality: Sending personalized booking confirmations and pre-arrival checklists for a smoother guest experience.

While these examples provide a high-level overview of customer experience automation use cases, it is also important to showcase in-depth examples of organizations using customer experience automation to improve their business. 

Jack in the Box

Jack in the Box struggled to provide personalized customer experiences and solicit accurate guest feedback. After choosing InMoment as their customer experience management solution, they were able to leverage InMoment AI and the XI Platform to automate feedback and pinpoint trends for business decisions, expedite insights across regions, and realize systemwide sales growth. 

Customer Experience Automation Tools

While many organizations provide customer experience automation tools, some of the most popular are: 

1. InMoment

2. HubSpot

3. Salesforce

4. Zendesk

5. Adobe Experience Cloud

1. InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience automation tools are led by award-winning AI that helps organizations handle repetitive tasks, predict customer intent, and generate actionable insights. Advanced analytics features, like sentiment analysis and feedback segmentation, allow brands to uncover deep insights and make impactful, real-time improvements. With intuitive integrations and customizable reporting, this solution is ideal for enterprise organizations looking to improve the customer experience while linking CX efforts to revenue growth. 

2. HubSpot

HubSpot’s customer experience automation solution is directed at frontline customer service teams that want to provide support on multiple channels. HubSpot offers automated workflows and personalized email marketing, which are ideal for engaging customers at every stage of the journey. While HubSpot is effective for smaller to mid-sized businesses aiming to build brand loyalty, its customer experience automation capabilities may require additional customization for large-scale enterprise needs.

3. Salesforce

The Salesforce CRM platform uses customer experience automation to deliver personalized customer experiences and support quality service at scale. With a vast range of integrations and robust data management features, Salesforce is a solid choice for larger organizations seeking an all-encompassing approach to customer experience. However, the platform’s complex setup and maintenance can demand significant resources, especially for companies new to customer experience automation.

4. Zendesk

Zendesk excels in customer support automation, providing tools like chatbots, ticket routing, and knowledge bases that streamline responses and improve efficiency. It’s particularly strong in service automation, making it a top choice for businesses prioritizing fast and effective support. While Zendesk is highly valuable for customer support, its customer experience automation capabilities focus more on service interactions than a complete customer journey across marketing and sales.

5. Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud logo

Adobe Experience Cloud offers a robust suite of tools for large enterprises aiming to personalize and orchestrate experiences at scale. With powerful analytics, real-time data integration, and content customization options, Adobe is ideal for brands leveraging data to drive engagement. However, Adobe’s features can require advanced technical expertise, and the platform is best suited for larger organizations with dedicated resources for setup and maintenance.

Customer Experience Automation Features to Look For

The performance of a customer experience automation platform will vary depending on your industry and the use cases of customer experience automation in your organization. Regardless, here are some of the most important features to look for in customer experience automation software. 

  • Integrations
  • Call Transcriptions
  • Customer Sentiment Tracking
  • Employee Coaching 
  • Triggered Surveys
  • Automated Alerts 

Integrations

When evaluating a customer experience automation platform, look for a platform that can easily integrate with your existing tech stack. Ensuring that your customer experience automation platform is compatible with CRM systems, marketing automation, and data platforms will ensure a seamless data flow between tools that give teams a unified view of the customer experience. This also makes it easier to automate processes across platforms. 

InMoment’s CX integrations ensure that your team doesn’t miss a beat by letting you connect your CX data with your CRM, marketing, call center, internal collaboration tools, and more to ensure you can collaborate and amplify your CX success across your organization. 

Data sources from different integrations being combined to provide a better customer experience.

Call Transcriptions

Call transcriptions are an important part of customer experience automation platforms. Call transcription features automatically convert a spoken conversation into text, which makes it easier to analyze customer interactions and track issues. Transcriptions also help with compliance, training, and quality assurance by allowing teams to review past conversations and see insights that can influence future customer service. 

InMoment’s conversation analytics software saves teams up to three minutes per call by automatically documenting agent notes, generating call summaries, and more to clarify actions to be taken after spoken conversations. 

InMoment's conversation analytics software generating a conversation summary after a call.

Customer Sentiment Tracking

Customer sentiment tracking uses AI to analyze customer emotions and tones. By identifying positive, neutral, or negative sentiments, customer experience automation tools can help your organization respond appropriately and prioritize interactions that may need immediate attention. 

InMoment’s XI Platform lets you quickly prioritize the most important actions from your unstructured data with real-time customer sentiment measures. This ensures that your most important customer issues are resolved first, helping you identify common sentiment themes or trends within your customer feedback. 

A sentiment analysis dashboard categorizing trending keywords by sentiment.

Employee Coaching

Customer experience automation tools can also help improve employee coaching capabilities by providing feedback and training based on past performance. These tools can analyze customer response patterns and highlight areas for improvement, such as communication skills, adherence to company best practices, and more. 

InMoment lets your managers coach employees with smart recommendations based on customer data. With customized, role-based action plans, managers in your organization can effectively drive improvements.

Smart employee action planning in InMoment's XI Platform.

Triggered Surveys

Triggered surveys are one of the best examples of customer experience automation. Triggered surveys are sent automatically based on specific customer actions such as completing a purchase or ending a support call. These targeted surveys help brands gather timely customer feedback at critical touch points. 

With InMoment’s XI Platform, you can automate event-based workflows that allow you to respond to customer actions as they happen. These workflows can be tailored to specific triggers, such as a recent purchase, a support ticket resolution, or a recently attended event. 

Automated Alerts

Automated alerts notify teams of important events or issues as they happen, such as a high-value customer showing signs of customer churn. These alerts help teams respond proactively to minimize negative customer experiences and improve customer retention. 

InMoment’s XI Platform acts as an always-on analyst by scanning our data and providing you with alerts on any patterns, trends, or anomalies that occur. With this information, you can act quickly on important information related to your customers, products, or services. 

Customer experience automation powered by AI in InMoment's XI Platform.

Set Up Customer Experience Automation With InMoment

InMoment has been recognized as a leader in customer experience automation. Organizations that partner with InMomet realize ROI on their CX investments twice as fast as they would with competitors. To see how the InMoment platform can improve your organization, schedule a demo today!

References 

Salesforce. The Sixth Edition State of Service Report. (https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/state-of-service/). Accessed 10/29/2024. 

HubSpot. 2024 Annual State of Service Trends Report. (https://offers.hubspot.com/state-of-customer-service). Accessed 10/29/2024.

Conversational Surveys: A Game-Changer in Feedback Collection

Conversational surveys are surveys designed to feel like a natural conversation rather than traditional survey questionnaires. With advanced AI, it enables an interactive approach to gathering more detailed customer feedback beyond the standard response of good, bad, or okay.
Survey Design

Conversational surveys are revolutionizing how businesses gather customer feedback by creating engaging, personalized interactions that resonate with all age groups, from Gen Z to Gen X. These dynamic surveys adapt their follow-up questions based on responses, enhancing engagement and encouraging more comprehensive survey participation. 

This innovative approach not only improves customer experience but also yields richer, actionable insights that empower businesses to refine their strategies. Discover how Conversational AI can transform your customer feedback process and help your business thrive.

What are Conversational Surveys?

Conversational surveys represent a modern approach to collecting customer feedback, transforming the experience from a static questionnaire into a dynamic conversation. These surveys use Conversational AI to mimic natural human dialogue, making the feedback process more interactive and engaging for respondents.

InMoment survey utilizing Active Listening to get more actionable customer feedback

With InMoment’s customer feedback software, respondents are 2.4x times more likely to leave actionable verbatim feedback. A higher engagement level can help you find areas where improvements will greatly impact CX. As a result, businesses can see a quicker ROI on customer experience.

How Do Conversational Surveys Differ from Traditional Surveys?

Traditional surveys typically follow a rigid format. Respondents must go through a set order of questions, regardless of their responses. This impersonal approach can lead to high drop-off rates and often results in incomplete or superficial responses. 

In contrast, conversational surveys are designed to feel more like a two-way interaction. Using chat interfaces or conversational AI, these surveys adjust their questions based on the respondent’s previous answers. 

This creates a more personalized and engaging experience. Conversational surveys encourage respondents to provide more detailed feedback. They also make the process feel more natural and less stressful.

Our conversational AI helps respondents 24% more likely to share valuable insights into their intentions. This opens more pre-emptive opportunities for engagement. By fostering a natural, open dialogue, it enables businesses to anticipate customer needs and respond proactively, strengthening connections and driving impactful customer interactions.

How are Conversational Surveys Beneficial for Businesses?

Conversational surveys offer several key benefits for businesses looking to elevate their customer experience:

  • Higher-Quality Feedback Collection: Conversational surveys talk to customers in a more natural way. This approach can collect up to 5x more actionable data compared to traditional methods. The flexibility of these surveys allows them to dive deeper into customer sentiments and uncover valuable insights that might otherwise be missed.
  • Faster Issue Resolution: With features like InMoment’s Rapid Resolution Engine, conversational surveys can identify and address customer issues in real-time, often before they escalate. This proactive approach not only enhances customer satisfaction but also reduces the volume of inquiries reaching your support team.
  • Enhanced Customer Experience and Satisfaction: By offering a more personalized and engaging feedback process, conversational surveys help foster stronger connections with customers. This, in turn, boosts loyalty and encourages repeat business.
  • Lower Support Costs: Channel deflection through conversational surveys means fewer issues escalate to costly customer service interactions. This efficiency translates to significant cost savings for businesses.

Our conversational survey has proven highly beneficial for our clients, with respondents leaving 70% more words in their feedback. Additionally, feedback related to customer effort increased by 17%. This gives your team a clear view of friction points along the customer journey. These added details provide richer insights, empowering your teams to take more personalized and impactful actions that truly resonate with customers.

How Do Conversational Surveys Work?

Conversational surveys work by utilizing advanced AI technologies to create a more interactive and responsive feedback experience. Tools like InMoment’s Active Listening AI engage with respondents in real time, prompting them with follow-up questions based on their initial answers. This approach not only keeps the conversation going but also ensures that the feedback gathered is detailed and contextually rich.

As customers provide feedback, the Rapid Resolution Engine analyzes their responses and identifies any underlying issues. It then offers immediate solutions, such as a helpful tutorial or video, directly within the survey. This seamless integration of feedback collection and problem-solving helps businesses elevate customer experience by addressing concerns before they become larger issues. Learn how the features of Active Listening and Rapid Response can elevate the customer experience.

Conversational survey

Examples of Conversational Surveys

Conversational surveys can take many forms, depending on the context in which they are used. For example:

  • Chat Surveys: These surveys use a chat interface to interact with customers. They might appear in the survey question itself, as a chat window on a website, or within an app, where the customer can provide feedback in a conversational style.
  • SMS Surveys: Similar to chat surveys, SMS surveys engage customers through text messages, asking questions, and collecting responses in real-time.
  • In-App Feedback: Embedded within mobile apps, these surveys can pop up at key moments in the customer journey, such as after completing a purchase or using a new feature, to gather immediate feedback.

How to Analyze Data from Conversational AI Surveys?

Conversational surveys are a powerful tool for gathering richer, more insightful customer feedback. Here are a few key steps to analyze conversational survey data effectively to enable your business to drive meaningful improvements in customer experience:

  1. Organize and Structure Responses: Start by categorizing responses based on topics, sentiments, and themes. Use natural language processing (NLP) tools or text analysis software to automate some of this categorization, grouping feedback by intent, emotion, or keywords.
  2. Sentiment Analysis: Apply sentiment analysis to determine the tone (positive, negative, or neutral) of responses. This step can help identify areas where customers are either satisfied or frustrated, allowing teams to prioritize areas for improvement.
  3. Thematic Analysis: Identify recurring themes, such as product features, service issues, or general experience. Text analytics can cluster feedback into topics, providing an overview of common areas customers mention. With conversational surveys, this might include tracking how often intent-driven words or phrases appear.
  4. Intent Analysis: Intent analysis goes beyond sentiment by identifying the purpose behind responses. For instance, customers may express a desire to buy, get support, or provide feedback. Recognizing these intents helps businesses identify pre-emptive engagement opportunities.
  5. Generate Actionable Insights: Use dashboards and reporting tools to transform raw data into visual summaries, allowing CX teams to quickly identify actionable insights. Regular reports that highlight emerging trends or urgent issues keep stakeholders informed and aligned.

However, with a surge of detailed responses, CX managers and teams face the challenge of efficiently analyzing it all. Depending on the volume, it can take weeks or even months to sift through feedback, delaying critical improvements that enhance customer satisfaction and demonstrate ROI. This bottleneck can slow your team’s ability to deliver impactful results, affecting overall business outcomes.

Empower your CX team to focus on implementing impactful strategies instead of getting bogged down in time-consuming analysis. That’s where InMoment’s text analytics solutions come in. With our advanced software, you can uncover rich insights in minutes rather than weeks. Our text analytics models identify 54% more topics, enabling your team to discover improvement opportunities with remarkable scale and precision.

How to select the right conversation survey solution?

Choosing the right conversational survey solution involves several key considerations:

  • Customization: Ensure the solution allows you to tailor surveys to reflect your brand’s voice and meet the specific needs of your audience.
  • Integration: The solution should easily integrate with your existing platforms, such as CRM systems, to streamline feedback collection and analysis.
  • AI Capabilities: Look for advanced AI features like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, which can enhance the quality of insights gathered from your surveys.
  • Data Security & Compliance: It’s crucial to choose a solution that keeps your data secure and complies with local regulations, especially if you operate in multiple regions.

InMoment’s Conversational Surveys are available to all existing customers at no extra cost. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to start leveraging this powerful tool. If you’re new to InMoment, schedule a demo. With InMoment’s Conversational Surveys, you’ll collect richer insights, resolve issues faster, and boost customer satisfaction—all while enhancing your bottom line.

Why New FTC Policies on Reviews and Ratings Matter for Your Business

In today’s digital-first marketplace, consumers rely heavily on online reviews and ratings when making purchasing decisions. Trust in these reviews is paramount, and a single misleading or deceptive review can jeopardize that trust.
Group of business people working together

Recognizing the crucial role online reviews play, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently announced stronger regulations to combat deceptive practices involving reviews and endorsements. These rules, which recently took effect, are designed to ensure transparency, fairness, and trust in online reviews, making it more important than ever for businesses to comply.

It’s essential for businesses to understand the FTC’s guidelines and why adhering to them is not only a legal obligation but also a pathway to building sustainable trust and customer loyalty.

The FTC’s Updated Regulations on Reviews and Endorsements

In August 2024, the FTC finalized new rules targeting fake reviews, deceptive endorsements, and manipulation of customer feedback. These rules prohibit a range of activities including:

  1. Fake or False Reviews: Businesses are banned from creating or disseminating reviews that misrepresent the reviewer’s identity, such as AI-generated reviews or testimonials from individuals who did not actually use the product​. For example, companies cannot post fake positive reviews or purchase them from third parties.
  2. Incentivized Reviews: Offering compensation or incentives for positive reviews or specific sentiments is illegal. Even offering incentives for a neutral or negative review, if the intent is to sway sentiment, is also prohibited.
  3. Insider Reviews: Reviews from employees or company insiders must include clear and conspicuous disclosures of their relationship to the business. This ensures that consumers understand the potential bias in such reviews.
  4. Review Suppression: Companies are not allowed to suppress negative reviews, whether through threats, legal action, or by selectively displaying only favorable reviews on their platforms​.
  5. Manipulating Social Media Indicators: Purchasing fake social media likes, followers, or views to falsely inflate a company’s reputation is also prohibited.

The FTC has made it clear that violating these rules could lead to steep penalties, including fines of up to $51,744 per violation​. But for companies, the real damage can go beyond financial penalties—violations can severely erode customer trust and damage long-term brand reputation.

Why Trust in Reviews Matters More Than Ever

At its core, the purpose of reviews and ratings is to create trust between businesses and potential customers. Even the SEO benefits of high ratings and review volume only exist because search engines like Google see value in prioritizing businesses that have established this positive relationship. 

In fact, Google recently announced it would impose restrictions on businesses that engage in fake engagement. Consumers depend on these reviews to provide an honest reflection of the product or service they are considering and when this trust is violated, it has ripple effects that can go far beyond a single purchase decision.

While the monetary fines imposed by the FTC are significant, the long-term damage to customer relationships and brand loyalty is much more alarming. Violating customer trust can take years to recover from, if at all. But in an era where reviews and ratings impact the bottom line so significantly, what is a business to do if its online reviews are not up to par?

The Struggle for Positive Reviews is Real—But Deception Isn’t the Solution

Businesses often struggle to gather a substantial number of positive reviews. Human nature dictates that consumers are often motivated to leave a review after an extreme experience. Regrettably, the threshold for an extreme experience tends to be highly positive or moderately negative. This means that businesses might feel that their current reviews don’t accurately reflect the quality of their products or services, as many satisfied customers do not leave reviews.

It’s understandable that businesses might feel tempted to manipulate reviews to offset the negative ones or to create a more favorable impression. But violating the FTC’s rules is not the solution.

The Ethical, Sustainable Path to Positive Reviews

Step 1 – Ask for Reviews: Instead of resorting to fake or incentivized reviews, businesses should focus on proactive engagement with customers to encourage honest feedback. There are tools available that allow businesses to easily solicit reviews from their broader base of customers. By making it easier for satisfied customers to leave feedback, businesses can ensure that their review profiles more accurately reflect their true service levels. Research shows that just by asking for reviews a business can improve their star rating.

Step 2 – Respond to Reviews: 94% of consumers say that a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business, but 45% of consumers say they’re more likely to visit a business that responds to negative reviews. The truth is that negative experiences reflected in reviews sometimes happen for valid and entirely explainable reasons. Respond to reviews to provide the necessary context and empathy. And because 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week, it’s important for businesses to respond in a timely manner. 

Step 3: Leverage the Voice of the Customer to Improve your Product: Reviews provide businesses with deeper insights into their business, helping identify what they’re doing well and where they might improve—even at the individual location level- as well as feedback left for their top competitors. Collecting customer feedback allows businesses to address concerns, improve their services, and naturally generate more positive feedback from satisfied customers.

Beyond public reviews, businesses can directly survey their customers as well as monitoring social media to capture broader Voice of the Customer (VOC) elements. By combining these methods, companies can address pain points before they even surface in public reviews, ensuring a more proactive and holistic approach to customer satisfaction.

Conclusion: Ethical Reviews Are the Path to Long-Term Success

In a landscape where consumers are increasingly reliant on online reviews, businesses that prioritize transparency and authenticity will ultimately succeed. Violating FTC rules on fake or incentivized reviews may offer short-term gains, but the long-term consequences—both financial and reputational—are far more damaging.

For businesses, the key to gathering positive reviews is not manipulation but engagement. With the right tools, companies can ethically and effectively manage their online reputation. By fostering genuine customer satisfaction, businesses can ensure that their reviews reflect the high quality of their services—without the need for deception.

As the FTC continues to crack down on deceptive practices, businesses have a clear choice: embrace transparency and ethical practices or risk facing severe penalties. The smart choice is clear, and with the right approach, it doesn’t have to be an onerous task.

References 

The Verge. Google Maps is cracking down on fake reviews (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254882/google-maps-removing-fake-business-reviews-warning-message). Accessed 10/31/24. 

National Strategic Group. Why Would They Write That?! The Psychology of Customer Reviews (https://www.nationalstrategic.com/why-would-they-write-that-the-psychology-of-customer-reviews/#:~:text=Surprising%20Consumer%20Behavior,to%20sound%20smarter). Accessed 10/31/24.

Spotting Fake Reviews and How to Get Real, Authentic Reviews

Fake reviews, often written by paid individuals, bots, or competitors, misrepresent genuine customer experiences and can mislead consumers. Spotting them involves looking for overly positive or negative language, vague descriptions, and suspicious reviewer profiles.
Close-up of Woman's Hand Holding a Smart Phone with Icon Five Star Symbol

Fake reviews are an escalating problem for both consumers and businesses. Nearly 30% of online reviews are now estimated to be fake, and this figure keeps rising. As consumers grow more aware of this issue, they’re becoming increasingly cautious about purchasing products or services. 

In fact, over 50% of consumers say they wouldn’t buy a product if they suspected the reviews were fake. Businesses can report fake reviews on platforms like Google and to the FTC, and using tools like InMoment’s Reputation Management can help gather authentic reviews and strengthen customer trust.

What is Considered a Fake Review?

A fake review is any review that is misleading, fabricated, or incentivized in a way that doesn’t represent a genuine customer experience. These can include reviews written by paid individuals, ai-generated reviews, or even disgruntled competitors looking to harm a business’s reputation.

Where do Fake Reviews Come From?

Fake reviews originate from various sources. Some businesses might pay for positive reviews to boost their products or competitors might post negative reviews to undermine other businesses. 

Automated systems, often referred to as bots, can also be programmed to flood review platforms with misleading feedback. Additionally, incentivized reviews, where customers are given free products or discounts in exchange for positive reviews, are increasingly common.

How to Spot Fake Reviews?

Spotting fake reviews can be challenging, as they often blend in with genuine feedback. Inauthentic reviews—whether excessively positive or sharply critical—can distort a business’s real value and lead to misguided decisions. Here are some quick tips to help you identify fake reviews:

Overly positive or negative language:  Authentic reviews tend to be more balanced. Be cautious of reviews that are excessively enthusiastic or intensely negative, as they may be less trustworthy.

Generic descriptions:  Watch for vague language that lacks specifics about the product, service, or experience. Genuine reviewers typically mention specific features, benefits, or issues they encountered.

Reviewer history: Check the reviewer’s profile age and activity. Fake profiles are often newly created, with little review history or reviews across unrelated categories.

Consistent monitoring: Regularly review customer feedback to catch suspicious patterns early. Set up alerts or schedules to keep track of any sudden changes that could indicate fake activity.

InMoment review management dashboard that shows reviews from multiple sites.

Fake Review Checker

Several tools are available for detecting fake reviews, such as Fakespot and ReviewMeta, which analyze reviews for patterns that may indicate inauthentic behavior. These tools can be helpful for evaluating the credibility of product reviews on platforms like Amazon, but they are less effective for location-based reviews found on platforms like Google Maps, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. 

This is a limitation for businesses interested in managing their local reputation, as location-based reviews significantly impact consumer trust and search rankings. While tools tailored specifically for location reviews are less common, review management software can help you monitor your customer feedback and address fake reviews at a location level.

How to Report a Fake Review? 

Many review platforms allow users to report reviews they suspect are fake, though the process can vary by site. When reporting, it’s helpful to gather as much information as possible to support your claim. Supporting evidence can include specifics like unusual language patterns, repeated phrases across multiple reviews, or timing patterns that seem out of the ordinary.

Businesses also have an additional avenue for reporting fake reviews: they can file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The FTC takes consumer and business reports seriously as part of its mission to protect against misleading practices.

How to Report a Fake Review on Google?

With 57.5% of all online reviews appearing on Google, knowing how to report a fake review is essential. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you attempt removal if you suspect a review is inauthentic:

  1. Sign in to your Google account and go to Manage Your Business Profile.
  2. Open the profile for the business you’d like to manage.
  3. On the left-hand menu, select Reviews.
  4. Locate the review you want to report, then click Flag as inappropriate.

Once flagged, Google will review the report. If the review is found to violate Google’s policies, it may be removed. To check the review’s status, you can visit the support page or contact Google support if no action has been taken within a few days

Are Fake Reviews Illegal?

Yes, fake reviews can be illegal in many jurisdictions. In the U.S., for instance, the FTC has clear guidelines against deceptive practices, which include posting or commissioning fake reviews. The FTC considers fake reviews a violation of the FTC Act, as they mislead consumers and distort fair competition. Companies found guilty of such practices can face substantial fines and other penalties.

The Risk of Faking Your Reviews

Posting or encouraging fake reviews carries significant risks beyond potential fines. For example, fake reviews can damage a brand’s credibility if customers suspect or uncover them. Once trust is lost, it’s hard to regain, and a company’s reputation may suffer in the long term. Search engines also have algorithms that detect suspicious review activity, so the risk of detection is high.

It’s far better to invest in strategies that organically boost positive customer reviews and ratings. Reliable, honest feedback is always more valuable and sustainable for business growth.

Boost Authentic Positive Reviews With InMoment

InMoment can help you get more authentic reviews and elevate your customer experience. Our Reputation Management solution empowers brands to grow their positive review base, all while staying compliant with FTC guidelines to protect brand reputation and foster long-term trust.

With InMoment, you can request reviews and even automate your solicitation workflows, saving valuable time while maximizing results. Review and keyword alerts enable your team to quickly address issues and spot reviews that might be fake.

Additionally, InMoment’s Integrated CX approach combines reviews with other valuable experience signals, such as survey data, competitor insights, call center data, and more. This unified perspective uncovers actionable insights for operational improvements that help you enhance customer experiences, leading naturally to more 5-star reviews.

Say “no” to fake reviews with InMoment! Schedule a call with us today to learn how to get more real reviews and boost your reputation.

References 

Invesp. The State of Fake Reviews – Statistics and Trends [2025] (https://www.invespcro.com/blog/fake-reviews-statistics/). Accessed 10/31/24.

Wisernotify. 15 Fake Review Statistics You Can’t Ignore (2024) (https://wisernotify.com/blog/fake-review-stats/). Accessed 10/31/24.

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