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2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

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2025 Consumer Experience Trends

Download our report to learn about the trends reshaping CX!

 
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2025 Consumer Experience Trends

Download our report to learn about the trends reshaping CX!

The ABCs of R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Respect is one of the key building blocks in a strong relationship, be it a marriage, friendship or business. Without it, we feel undervalued and underappreciated. In a customer-brand context, this is an incredibly important concept. Customers increasingly have opportunities to express their concerns and attitudes with brands in a multitude of ways, from a traditional survey response to a simple tweet. How brands react to this changing landscape is critical. According to the Institute of Customer Service’s (ICS) European Customer Satisfaction Index, leaders, stakeholders and organisations that build and foster relationships based on respect will be best-placed to achieve sustained customer and employee engagement.

Respect is a vital part of the customer experience mix as customers want to feel valued by the brands they interact with. Simply put, a customer that is willing to trade money for goods or services deserves to be treated as more than just a number. Feeling undervalued creates a strong, emotional state that can have a marked effect on both short- and long-term spend, loyalty and advocacy.

InMoment spoke to customers globally about how they feel following a negative experience and how this impacts on future buying prospects in our 2017 CX Trends Study. The responses clearly demonstrated the need for brands to get customer service right, with one French consumer saying “I have no desire to set foot in this store again” following a negative experience. At the end of the day, a customer has a simple expectation for the brand to deliver – be it having a product in stock or good quality food. When the brand gets that wrong, customers feel let down.

The customer-employee relationship is perhaps one of the most important relationships where respect must be a key focus. The ICS’s European Customer Satisfaction Index found that customers’ top priorities are mostly related to staff attitudes and behaviours, complaint handling and product reliability. Across eight different European countries, the three key customer priorities included:

  • Staff doing what they say they will do
  • Staff competence
  • Staff understanding a customer issue

The reason why these issues are so important to customers boils down to respect – a customer trusts a brand to deliver goods or services and be knowledgeable about those goods and services. Furthermore, if a problem occurs, a customer trusts that the brand will fix it. These expectations are infinitely reasonable so when they aren’t met, customers lose respect for the brand which can lead to them never interacting with that brand again.

It is essential that brands create a culture of respect, both organisationally and in CX in particular. There are four key steps to achieving this:

  • Empower conversation
  • Let the customer tell you their story
  • Let the customer know you have heard them
  • Take action and fix the issue (and let customers know you’ve made a change)

Empower conversation

Customer feedback is a fantastic way to demonstrate to customers that brands respect them and their opinions, however many methods of obtaining that feedback can actually work against a positive relationship. For example, surveys are often far too long, and questions don’t apply to the customer’s actual experience. When a brand asks questions, they should be tailored to the extent possible using data from CRM systems and loyalty programmes – availability of technology makes bespoke surveys possible, and customers are beginning to expect that type of personalisation.

Furthermore, brands should use a variety of methods for listening to customers, so customers can provide feedback in a way that’s easy and preferable to them. In addition to traditional surveys, brands should consider using video feedback, harnessing social media and building feedback into mobile applications. Increasingly adept mobile-embedded voice assistants like Siri are making voice feedback viable and simple. The objective with feedback should be to empower authentic conversation with your customers instead of a one-way interrogation.

Letting the customer tell you their story

Surveys traditionally ask a customer to respond to a series of questions with a numerical rating scale, providing structured data which can be easily reviewed, compared and analysed. However, structured data only touches the surface of a customer’s experience. It doesn’t highlight how or why a customer felt a particular way or the details of a particular experience.

People have told stories each other since the beginning of time – storytelling is intrinsic to being human and it should be harnessed in CX. Giving customers the flexibility to talk freely about their experiences without the constraints of numbers and direct questions does two things. Firstly, it provides unstructured data which brands can analyse at a deeper level. Secondly, allowing customers to tell their story, on their own terms, demonstrates a respect for their attitudes and makes the customer feel valued.

Letting the customer know you have heard them

Giving customers the opportunity to freely and openly talk about their experiences is the first step to demonstrating respect. To truly show customers their value as a consumer, however, brands must respond to this feedback and let them know that their voice has been heard.

Firstly, brands must respond to customers in a personalised way. If a brand responds to every single piece of feedback with the exact same message, it gives the impression that the customer’s feedback isn’t truly appreciated. Automation, CRM tools and loyalty programmes make personal responses straightforward, meaning bespoke responses to feedback can be provided without impacting on a brands resources.

Additionally, transparency in response to customer complaints is essential. As previously discussed, when a customer has a bad experience, they associate negative feelings with that experience. To help turn a negative experience into a neutral, or even positive experience, brands must respond in a timely fashion – through automated prioritisation tools – and tell the customer what they will be doing to help resolve the issue. This demonstrates to customers that they are respected and valued.

Take action

Bringing customers full-circle in a journey of change is the ultimate demonstration of respect, helping foster trust and loyalty in the brand. According to the ICS, trust increases in parallel with increasing customer satisfaction levels. Much of this is due to brands making business changes on the back of customer feedback. Primark changed their staff uniforms in the past year from black shirts to blue following customer feedback that staff were difficult to find. The New York Bagel company also made the big change of ceasing all pre-slicing of their bagels after public outrage of the reduced quality in bagels when pre-sliced. Their Facebook post letting customers know they’re taking on board all feedback garnered many emotionally-charged responses to the sliced bagel debate. Whilst these are small steps in improving the customer experience, the message it communicates is significant: customers are valued and that their views are respected and listened to.

It is no surprise that brands that listen to feedback and make changes as a result do better in customer service indices. Respect, trust and loyalty are all interlinked – demonstrating to customers that they are respected will lead to greater trust in the brand and will foster brand loyalty. This will result in stronger customer satisfaction scores and an altogether better customer experience. In the UK for example, companies that rank higher on the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) rank higher for trust with the UK average being at 78.2 out of 100 for UKCSI and 7.7 for trust in July 2017.

Get respect right, and stronger CX scores and improved business performance will follow.

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4 Common Reasons Brands Don’t Invest in CX

Every company provides some level of customer experience, whether they create it consciously or not. The question your brand needs to be asking is: Are you investing enough in your CX initiatives? In most cases, the answer is “no.”

There are dozens of reasons why your brand should be investing in customer experience. As a matter of fact, McKinsey & Company, notes that “Optimizing the customer experience typically achieve(s) revenue growth of 5-15% and cost reductions of 15-25% in just 2-3 years.” So why do so many brands choose not to invest, or invest enough, in customer experience?

We’ll dive into four of the most common reasons why many businesses put off investing in a CX program until it’s too late.

1. “I’m not sure how to prove ROI.”

Many businesses struggle to identify the ROI of a CX program and they use that as a reason to justify forgoing CX initiatives, and it is not an illegitimate concern. The ROI of CX can be hard to establish because it is not usually a single number. Measuring the ROI of CX is possible, it just requires a different approach.

The way your company measures ROI can depend on how the program is structured and whether a specific team owns it, or whether it’s a cross-functional endeavor. Some key items that can determine ROI are things like increasing lifetime customer value, reducing customer churn, increasing employee retention or reducing operational costs.

For more information on how to hone in on the ROI of CX, you can check out our eBook, The Five Steps to an ROI-Focused CX Program.

2. “It seems expensive.”

Doing business is expensive and spending even more money on customer experience can seem like just another extraneous expense. However not taking the time or spending the money to understand your customers, however, is even more expensive. By operating without the full context of your brand’s customer experience, your organization might be focusing on improving experiences that are not important to the customers, or that might not contribute economic benefits to the company..

By putting the customer first and understanding the experience from their point of view, brands are able to identify key areas for improvement and are better able to prioritize those that will have the most financial impact. When managed properly, most CX programs will pay for themselves.

According to Jocelyn Wieser, senior retail business intelligence analyst for Cabela’s, “Through the implementation of ….technology and best practices, we’ve tripled our feedback rate, created a more customer-friendly and effective survey, responded to nearly 9,000 customer concerns, and realized almost $9 million in new revenue. In under six months, the program paid for itself many times over.”

3. “I can’t please everybody, so I won’t rock the boat.”

The reasoning behind this excuse is based on the assumption that customers as a whole are hard to please. This leads to unfortunate idea that if not everyone can be pleased, why spend the extra money and make the effort?

Contrary to this idea, our 2017 CX trends report, “The Power of Emotion and Personalization,” uncovered that—regardless of industry or country—customer expectations are reasonable. Our research found that 38% of consumers worldwide ranked “satisfied” as the number one emotion they associated with positive brand experiences. However, this number doesn’t do the actual requirements for a positive experience justice.

Contrary to popular belief, consumers are generally pretty easy to please. The opportunity is there to create positive interactions with your brand. With such reasonable expectations, your organization can’t afford to do the bare minimum—or nothing at all. There is so much more to gain from investing in a CX initiative. To ignore the obvious benefits of these is to refuse the possibility to turn customers to brand advocates.

4. “CX doesn’t appear critical.”

The impact of a negative experience can ripple through any organization and have an adverse impact on your brand’s bottom line. Studies have found that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved customer experience. CX programs help to single out those negative experiences and close the loop with your customers, stopping the negative ripple effect in its tracks.

By using a dedicated program and advanced technology to measure the customer experience, businesses are able to realize the value of putting the customer first. Understanding that there is more to the customer story than just being satisfied or unsatisfied is the first step in creating a truly robust CX strategy that will ultimately impact business performance.

If you are considering investing in customer experience, you’re probably considering all sides of the decision. And though negative reasons (such as the ones listed above) do exist, they are more often a result of misunderstanding or a lack of information. A strategic, comprehensive CX program can clarify perspective to reveal the obvious answer: It is always beneficial for brands to spend their time and money on improving their customer’s experience.

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How to Navigate Data Protection Laws Across Borders

Every second, vast amounts of information are transmitted across the globe. The number of Google searches, Facebook posts and WhatsApp messages sent in a mere 60 second time frame is truly phenomenal. Smart Insights recently revealed that approximately 3.3 million Facebook posts, 29 million WhatsApp messages and over 149,000 emails are sent every minute. In this fast paced digital environment, ‘data’ has thus gained considerable momentum and has become the lifeblood of the global information economy today. With this rise in data, data protection and privacy have become vital components of business practice. Recent cyber-attacks have further sparked an increase in these laws in over 100 countries according to Privacy International.

Data and the customer experience

The last 10 years has witnessed an upsurge in innovation, globalisation and digitalisation that has empowered people with advanced technology. This has caused a shift in global communication as more businesses move their dealings online. In fact, e-commerce has emerged a vital driver of economic growth around the world. A survey conducted by the Centre for Retail Research showed that the online retail sector is the main driver for growth in European retailing, achieving growth rates in Europe of 15.6 per cent in 2016, and expected increases in 2017 of 14.2 per cent and 13.8 per cent in 2018.

Alongside this revolution is a notable difference in customer experience (CX) strategies, and most organisations today consider it business critical. Personalisation strategies and functionality have become core components of many customer experience programmes today. Coca Cola’s ‘named’ bottles took the social media world by storm when they were first introduced. Amazon is also a prime example of a brand that provides customers with customised content and tailored messaging. Amazon’s commitment to personalisation has resulted in ownership of a whopping 16 per cent of UK’s online retail market. Suffice it to say, in order to meet the customer demands of today, businesses are collecting and analysing more and more customer data.

Importance of data protection and privacy laws

While the internet is recognised as critical for the majority of economic and social activities across the globe, policymakers are becoming increasingly aware of its ability to be a source of vulnerability. The only way citizens and consumers will have confidence in both government and businesses, is if there are strong data protection laws and regulations in place. Insufficient data protection can have long-lasting consequences as it may create negative market effects by reducing consumer confidence and overall customer experience. Today, consumer protection it is a fundamental right. Data protection is needed to protect consumers against deliberate acts of misuse or the possibility of accidental loss and misuse of data.

While there are common themes and similarities to the laws introduced by different countries, there are also variations in the levels of security, requirements, penalties and even interpretations by regulators and auditors. To effectively safeguard personal information across markets worldwide, global operating companies must understand all risks and legal responsibilities across a range of data protection laws.

Difference in global data protection laws

Among the many regions that have passed data protection regulations, the European Union (EU) has stood out for its comprehensive approach over the years. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), effective from early 2018, will impact many companies doing business globally. The law impacts any business selling goods and services in Europe specifically those that store, process or transfer any kind of personal data of EU citizens – including posts on social media, payroll processing and medical records. An organisation’s ability to transfer personal data outside of Europe is restricted under EU data protection rules. Those restrictions will remain in place under the GDPR. The regulation will revamp the way information is collected from customers and used by businesses. It is expected to cement privacy rights for 500 million EU residents and will impose substantial fines for misconduct (up to 4 per cent of annual global revenues) and a 72-hour breach notification requirement.

With Brexit around the corner, the British government has further announced that it will adopt the new GDPR while the country remains in the EU and echo it once it leaves.

Under the GDPR, Member States are given some flexibility to pass local laws and further specify the GDPR’s application. Germany, already known to have the most stringent data protection laws, is the first to do so, and more EU Member States are expected to follow soon. It is, therefore, becoming apparent that while harmonisation is the ultimate goal of the GDPR, there are still going to be some variations between member states.

In this context, the German Federal Parliament recently adopted the new German Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz – BDSG) effective from May 2018. This new law replaces the existing Federal Data Protection Act of 2003 and is intended to adapt the current German data protection law to the EU GDPR. The new BDSG intends to protect personal data from being processed and used by both federal public authorities and private bodies. It further imposes specific data processing requirements with respect to video surveillance, and consumer credit, scoring and creditworthiness. In addition to the high fines imposed by the GDPR, the BDSG imposes fines of up to EUR 50,000 for violations regarding German law exclusively. Companies will further be obliged to appoint a data protection officer (DPO).

The United States on the other hand, has over 20 sector specific or medium-specific national privacy or data security laws, with different laws functioning among its 50 states. Additionally, there are a large range of companies that are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. However, all the states within the U.S. follow a sectoral approach to data protection legislation, where the laws of data protection and privacy rely on a combination of legislation, regulation, and self-regulation rather than government interference alone.

France, however, protects data privacy of its citizens through The Data Protection Act (DPA) of 1978 (revised in 2004) and applies to the collection of information used to identify anyone. The rules apply to anyone collecting data located in France or those carrying out activities in an establishment in France. In 2014, Google France was fined for failure to comply with this and for violation of their privacy law.

China recently introduced cyber-security legislation banning the collection and sale of a user’s personal information. Firms within the country will have to store user data on servers inside China, and people will be given the right to have their information deleted. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement that the purpose is to safeguard China’s national cyber-space sovereignty and national security rather than to restrict foreign enterprises.

Less stringent laws in Australia are governed by Australia’s Privacy Principles (APP) – a collection of 13 principles guiding the handling of personal information. Companies are required to manage personal information in an open and transparent way, having an up-to-date privacy policy about how they manage personal information.

How can companies cope with global disparities in data protection?

A recent Veritas survey of over 2,500 senior technology decision makers, noted that individuals responsible for implementing a GDPR process also face a variety of risks if data is not handled properly. The survey showed that close to 40 per cent of companies were fearful of a major compliance failing within their business, and just under one-third (31 per cent) were concerned about reputational damage from poor data policies. Given already existing variations in implementation, companies will need to focus not only on the GDPR itself, but also on national law, as they prepare their compliance efforts. Given that the UK has one of the largest economies in the world, it is undeniable that these strict laws will have an impact on global business operations.

In order to continue executing superior customer experience strategies that mirror demands of personalisation today, decision makers must be wary of the differences in data protection laws in different markets. In practice, the first step towards successful compliance will be for businesses and their respective decision makers to know where their information resides and from where it’s being accessed. For companies with different office locations, the challenge will be working out which part of the data these changes apply to and determining which information currently residing in branches will have to be centralised to a geographical location compliant with the law.

Global and local businesses alike must ensure that any form of customer data is collected and stored in compliance with different country’s data protection laws. One example of this in practice is InMoment using cloud data centres to enable the secure storing of customer data for European clients.

Furthermore, it is important that businesses allocate resources and educate themselves on the steps needed to comply with future regulations. Conducting comprehensive risk assessments in 2017 can help companies identify and fill gaps in existing data protection programmes. It is important to understand that some may need a full year to remediate, implement and test compliant procedures and policies, which may even include the purchase of new technology.

Finally, companies marketing to customers and prospects across borders must use this year to look for continued global legislation, enforcement activity and litigation regarding the interplay between telemarketing, email marketing and text message marketing and data protection laws and regulations, particularly.

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4 Voice of the Customer Tools Every Restaurant Owner Should Know About

When it comes to dining out, everybody has a preference. Some people are held back by dietary restrictions, some are adventurous eaters, and some are just plain picky. There is not one type of restaurant that will please everyone, and that makes dining an incredibly personal experience.

The most obvious determinant for a positive customer experience in a restaurant is the quality of food, but there are many other factors that weigh into culinary satisfaction. The majority of these concerns can be sorted into five major categories: quality of food, staff interactions, speed of service, atmosphere, and value.

In a world where 91% of unhappy customers will not return to a brand, it is crucial for restaurants to drive customer satisfaction in these areas—but how can they keep up?

That is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) technology comes in. These technologies give providers direct access to their customer feedback so they can make impactful changes in the way they do business.

Voice of the Customer solutions can be applied to restaurants in many ways, but I am going to outline four specific VoC tools that can address these five main concerns and determine positive or negative customer experience for your diners.

Real-time Alerts

Some Voice of the Customer platforms offer real-time alerts that notify staff of customer concerns as they happen, allowing them to take action almost immediately. Though these can address all five categories listed above, they can be most helpful with issues of atmosphere and quality of food.  If a customer asserts that the bathrooms in a certain location are unclean or the food is cold, the location would receive a notification of that customer’s feedback as it was made. Management could then rectify the situation, helping to ensure positive atmosphere and quality of food experiences for other customers that day.  

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics give businesses the power to forecast demand and make differences in both speed of service and staff interactions. With this VoC tool, managers can determine when there is a rush and schedule staff accordingly.  This small adjustment stops one of the biggest customer complaints—long lines and wait times—before it even starts. As an added bonus, staff members won’t be under pressure from grumpy customers, ensuring positive staff interactions for customers.

Location-Specific Insights

VoC Programs with location specific insights are most useful for identifying anomalies in quality of food. For example, if there are three cases of food poisoning in one region, businesses will be made aware of the problem before it gets out of control. This tool is also useful when testing out a new product. If one region tests it, location-specific insights can surface conclusive customer feedback on the new product.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking VoC tools give restaurants the ability to see how they match up in comparison to their competitors. This can be most useful when comparing value of their meals versus other providers. With this information, businesses can make cost-effective changes to assure customers that they are getting the best value for their dollar.

At the end of the day, all restaurateurs strive for satisfied customers, no matter what kind of food they serve. By utilizing VoC tools, businesses can make day-to-day, time-relevant adjustments that tailor to their customers’ taste and give them the best dining experience possible.  

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Don’t Skip This Step When Choosing a CX Vendor

The journey to improve customer experience (CX) begins with identifying your business objectives, and recognizing the need to listen to your customers and analyze what they’re telling you. The steps forward from that starting point vary, but many organizations jump into comparing customer experience vendors right away.

Though researching is a critical step toward that ultimate goal, it should not be the first step you take. Let me explain why: By browsing the sites of various vendors, you get a great idea of what they have to offer you, but how do you know if they can fulfill your company’s needs?

The answer is you don’t!

This is why I am going to suggest an alternate first step for you. Before looking at vendors, it is pivotal to first plan your objectives. What does your company hope to gain with CX technology? What needs should be fulfilled? What areas of strength or weakness are you already aware of in your customer experience?

These questions should help to get you thinking, but I have also outlined three specific things you should do while planning your objectives.

Think Short and Long Term

Your ideal customer experience platform should be able to address all points on your business timeline, from the current state of your company and its immediate needs to your long-term goals. Outlining your big picture goals will help you to have your vision in mind when you look critically at potential CX technologies. This will also help you to determine which vendor best fits your company both now and down the line.

Include All Company Stakeholders

We are all familiar with the “it takes a village” saying, and more than likely, this is true of your company. When you are outlining your goals, be sure to include any decision makers, stakeholders, and influencers in the process. This will help you to gain a more comprehensive view of needs and requirements. Understanding expectations from all your company’s angles will help you to set clear requirements and guidelines for any CX vendor you choose.

Write It Up 

Once you have brainstormed, discussed, and specified your goals with your stakeholders, it’s time to put it all together. Consider creating a 1-2 page executive summary of your findings to use as a guide. This gives you something concrete to provide potential vendors as you research their solutions. From this document, they can more clearly communicate to you the areas of their program that will address your specific needs. Their response to this document will also give you a clear idea as to how the vendor will be to work with. If they respond with thoughtful questions and solutions, it is more than likely that they will prove to be an invested asset for your company in the future.

The CX journey is different for every organization, but planning objectives is a crucial step that will make selecting a customer experience platform that much easier.

So what are your next steps? If you would like more advice on where to go from here, check out our new resource, Customer Experience Buyer’s Guide: What to Know Before You Buy Software Promising to Improve the Customer Experience.

Download the full guide here.

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The Loyalty Metric: A Brief History of Net Promoter Score and How to Use it in Practice Today

More than two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 list currently use Net Promoter Score, a customer loyalty metric introduced by Fred Reichheld in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow.” One number. And to get to that one number, you only have to ask one question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this [product/brand/company/service]?” Anyone who scores 0-6 is considered a Detractor. Passives rate 7 and 8. Promoters are those who score 9s and 10s – extremely likely to recommend.

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting Detractors from Promoters. Scores can range anywhere from -100 to 100. It couldn’t be simpler, or more powerful. Since 2003, the popularity of that one number has grown exponentially, spawning specialty apps to track it and spurring researchers to study it. The most recent study by Temkin Group of 10,000 U.S. consumers showed a direct connection between NPS and customer loyalty across 20 industries. In 291 companies, NPS was highly correlated to the likelihood of repeat purchases from existing customers. In fact, promoters across those 20 industries were 92% more likely to make more purchases than detractors (not surprising), were 9 times more likely to try new offerings, and 5 times more likely to repurchase. Promoters were also 7 times more likely than Detractors to forgive companies if they made a mistake. Loyalty is lucrative. The ability to measure and improve it is imperative. And that’s where NPS comes into play.

Calculating Loyalty Used to be Hard

The CEOs in the room knew all about the power of loyalty. They had already transformed their companies into industry leaders, largely by building intensely loyal relationships with customers and employees. – “The One Number You Need to Grow,” Frederick F. Reichheld Reichheld’s NPS origin story begins in a boardroom with chief executives from brands like Chick-fil-A and Vanguard. They’d gathered to discuss what they were doing to increase customer loyalty, and when the CEO of Enterprise Rent-a-Car spoke, everyone listened. He’d found a way to quantify loyalty that didn’t use traditional, complex and faulty customer surveys. His solution was a poll with just two questions:

  • How would you rate the quality of your rental experience?
  • How likely are you to rent from us again?

The simplicity of this approach allowed for faster results – nearly real-time feedback – that could then be relayed to the company’s far-flung branches. But Enterprise did something else as well: They only counted the customers who gave their experience the highest possible rating. Why ignore the less happy customers? Because concentrating on the happiest customers let the company focus on a main driver of growth – the customers who returned to rent again and recommended Enterprise to their friends. Today’s NPS hasn’t ventured far from Enterprise’s system, and it is still has two-parts:

  • “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this [product/brand/company/service]?”
  • “Why did you give us that score?”
Setting up an NPS program? Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Leverage customer feedback and drive growth with a real-time approach to NPS.

How SaaS companies use Net Promoter Score in practice

NPS has risen in popular estimation from ‘a nice number to know’ to the most important number you can track for growth for a reason. But to understand that reason, you have to see how real companies are using this information. Receipt Bank is an award-winning bookkeeping platform that saves accountants, bookkeepers, and small businesses valuable time and money, and all of their business is subscription-based. While every business can benefit from NPS, growth of subscription-based businesses are inherently tied to customer loyalty – customers have to choose, over and over again, to come back. Receipt Bank had a challenge though. They recognized the value of measuring user NPS, and so were sending monthly emails to survey sample groups across their user base. However, this method was time-consuming to set up, and resulted in their NPS score only being updated on a monthly basis. With new initiatives being constantly released across Receipt Bank to improve the customer experience, monthly sampling just didn’t provide the quality of insight needed. In addition to the delay, users were reluctant to respond when presented with another email task to complete. Conversion rates were low. With the happiness of users on the line, Receipt Bank needed a fast, efficient way to gauge how well their product performed. To overcome these challenges, ReceiptBank tested triggering their NPS surveys in-app — while users were logged in and using their product. Their hunch was right, and their survey response rate jumped ten fold in the first 48 hours.

Quick path to high response rates & real-time NPS

Segment offered an ideal implementation solution: It is a central data and analytics platform that allows Receipt Bank to turn on tools for their teams as needed. Every team has its own data needs and its own list of preferred tools. In addition to tools that let ReceiptBank report on marketing campaigns, message their customers, A/B test, and find fresh user insights, they used Segment to integrate Wootric, a customer feedback management platform that delivers the NPS questionnaire in-app, to measure user experience. “Because of Segment, Wootric was simple to install and within a few hours, we had live NPS data like we’ve never had before,” says Steve Lucas, ‎Customer Experience Manager at Receipt Bank.

Delivering the NPS question in-app, while customers are using the product, continues to result in higher response rates. Not only that, but in-app surveying allows for a more representative sample of their active users, providing more powerful insights into their customers’ happiness. “We’ve seen a much higher response (10x) using in-app messaging to obtain our NPS data. Having a real-time NPS pulse has really helped us support our users better and resolve root causes to improve the CX for our whole customer base,” says Steve.

Improved Net Promoter Score = higher loyalty

“The combination of closing the feedback loop effectively and identifying common experience shortcomings has allowed us to improve our NPS score by at least 40% in just 6 months,” Steve reports. Once a company establishes its baseline score, it can then pursue A/B testing and other means to continually improve it. Receipt Bank, like most companies, combines the basic NPS question with a qualitative, or open-ended, follow-up question that asks users to explain their answer. Armed with these insights, companies can test improvement ideas to see what works best for their best customers. NPS is also a valuable addition to Customer Success programs. Wootric reports that Customer Success teams use their constant stream of customer health data to save accounts at the first signs of trouble, identify promoters ready for upsells, and celebrate clients’ successes – reinforcing their positive perceptions of the product. NPS works on multiple levels to alert you to trends in your user base, and reinforce your users’ positive perspectives of your company. It’s no wonder that promoters are more likely to become repeat buyers, upgrade their accounts, try new offerings, and recommend your company.

Taking action by Net Promoter Score segment

Now that you know who is a Promoter, Passive or Detractor, what can you do about it? Promoters offer the most immediate wins. Clearly, they’re already finding success with your product, so the question becomes: Could they be even more successful with an upgrade, expansion, or additional feature? But don’t just focus on selling, even though Promoters may be ready to buy. Show your appreciation. Make them love you even more. These are your best customers! And, most importantly, empower them to become vocal advocates of your brand. Don’t be afraid to immediately ask them to leave reviews for you, Tweet about you, or participate in your latest Instagram hashtagathon. Encourage them to join an “inside circle” of community members in a private Facebook group or section of your site. Making your best customers feel appreciated is the best thing you can do to attract more of them. Passives are tough cases. They’re just not that impressed, and your job is to figure out why. Hint: They’re not achieving the success they’d hoped for with your product, in all likelihood. Why is that? It’s worth your time to find out. Detractors do not like your company and/or your product. And for some of them, it can’t be helped – but don’t worry. They’re probably not your ideal customers. Some of them shouldn’t even be using your product in the first place, like a guy who wants to heat a frozen pizza quickly so he buys a toaster (instead of a toaster oven). But others have legitimate grievances, and they are worth winning back. First, determine whether or not they are your ideal customers (did they want the toaster oven?). If they’re not, point them in the direction of a product – even a competitor’s product – that will get them the results they want. They’ll be so impressed. Non-ideal clients waste time and resources, are never happy, are always willing to jump ship for cheaper competitors anyway, and are more likely to be detractors than promoters. By sifting them out, you can put your focus on target clients who will love you, promote you, and not drive your customer service department crazy in the process. Everybody wins! However, if detractors are your ideal customers, find out why they aren’t willing to recommend you. Did they have a bad experience? Are they not achieving their desired outcomes? All segments, however, benefit from receiving responses to the feedback they so generously give you. So remember to acknowledge their effort with something as simple as a quick, personal thank you.

NPS is a journey, not a destination

NPS is an ongoing effort that never really ends, and never should. Keeping your finger on the pulse of how your customers feel about you will become central to how you conduct your business – if you let it.

Measure and improve customer experience. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

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From Touchpoint Surveys to a Continuous Conversation: How to Use VoC Data More Strategically

Touchpoint Survey

The way most companies use Voice of Customer (VoC) data today is leaving opportunity the table.

Generally, VoC data is used behind the scenes to identify problems, plug holes, and get a general sense of how associates or agents are performing at one particular touchpoint.

While there is value in this approach, it remains highly reactive, and limited. It only provides brief glimpses into the customer experience—a snapshot of a single moment in time. It is looking at individual interactions rather than the entire journey.

The data tends to be siloed and used only by the team that collects it. Doing this means those valuable insights can be used to improve that touchpoint, but misses the opportunity to create a better end-to-end experience for the customer.

A more strategic approach: Using VoC—both the process of listening, and applying the resulting insight—continuously at every touchpoint along the customer journey.

By shifting your perspective from surveying customers, to being engaged in a continuous conversation, you will open a wealth of new opportunities for both operational improvements and more profitable relationships.

Transforming Customer Experiences with VoC Data

VoC insights are one of the most important tools for developing a personalized and memorable customer experience. Customer expectations continually evolve and when done right, VoC intelligence can help ensure the customer experience continues to align with those expectations.

A recent Forrester report—How to Build the Right CX Strategy—highlights just how important customer insights are in designing effective customer experiences. In particular, these insights serve as a basis for developing the right CX strategy. VoC can be used to understand the following:

  • Customers’ Emotional Needs: What are your customers’ pain points? Are there unmet expectations? Do these expectations differ across personas? VoC data is a powerful tool because it makes something seemingly intangible, such as assessing emotional connections, possible. And considering that how customers feel when interacting with a brand is a significant driver of loyalty, it’s absolutely critical to understand customers’ emotional needs and execute a strategy to deliver a more personalized, engaging experience.
  • CX Expectations: What touchpoints are the most important in your customers’ journey? Leveraging VoC feedback across the entire journey will enable brands to understand customers’ expectations and prioritize the touchpoints that have the greatest impact on loyalty. Also, focusing on open-end narrative feedback will create a deeper understanding of expectations and allow you to uncover insights you can’t get when focusing on scores. These expectations evolve quickly in today’s marketplace. By eliciting and examining customer feedback continuously, you’ll ensure you are delivering on these evolving needs.
  • Drivers of Loyalty: Today’s VoC analysis tools empower businesses to learn more from feedback. For example, you can identify specific touchpoints that have a large impact on loyalty and are likely to either create promoters or detractors. Focusing on these “moments of truth” and ensuring you exceed customer expectations will drive customer loyalty and create brand advocates. As customer feedback pours in from these important touchpoints you can deploy resources to fix issues and recover customers.

What a Continuous Approach Looks Like

VoC intelligence powers how a brand shapes and refines the customer experience. You can ensure you’re aligning with customer expectations. And when you’re constantly monitoring these expectations and emotional needs, your CX will become more dynamic and adaptable.

A continuous approach requires VoC data to be plugged into the entire customer journey. So beyond merely just researching and designing CX opportunities, you can use customer feedback for:

  • Discovering Opportunities: Rich customer feedback data can reveal what your customers want and where opportunities exist. New products, new features, or servicing options can all be discovered through effective analysis of customer feedback when listening across the entire journey.
  • Identifying Solutions to Problems: You know the types of feedback detractors are sharing. This information can help you in the moment to isolate problems and provide quick solutions. For example, let’s say in Region A, you see a spiking number of customers are having trouble getting answers to a particular product issue. You can use this insight in real time to optimize your workforce and deploy targeted training to address customer concerns.
  • Relationship Monitoring: VoC data can also help us nurture relationships at the individual customer level. You can use it to check in with customers throughout the customer lifecycle and determine how you’re delivering on their expectations over time.
  • Identifying Differentiators: One of the most profound insights you can discover by listening to customers are your differentiators. What makes you special? What makes you stand out? Many brands do this with no or very little customer input, which is a huge mistake. Customers are telling you. All it takes is the willingness to listen.

Bottom Line: A Strategic Approach to VoC Data Starts with a Mindset

Looking at VoC data differently can help you glean more strategic value from customer insights. The data and the tools are at your fingertips. The key, though, is mindset. A reactive-only approach leaves opportunity on the table. Instead, we should approach VoC data with a mindset that customer insights are a source of intelligence for the entire enterprise.

Your customers are your best partners. And that means they must have a permanent seat at the table. Their voices should be heard. Every day. Across all areas of your business.

If your organization isn’t currently taking this approach, take the first step. Look at what customers are telling you, and connect that intelligence to one new initiative or area of your business. Share those insights, and you’re on your way to a more strategic and vastly more beneficial way of bringing the voice of your customers into your business.

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Engagement and Loyalty: How Employees Can Be Your Best Customer Advocates

Editor’s note: This is a chapter from the ebook, Unlock the Value of CX. You can download the entire book here.

Forward

Our understanding that there is a connection between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction goes back at least to the Service Profit Chain Model. We have since come to understand that the connection runs deeper than we first thought and, if anything, is growing even more intertwined. Today’s customers expect more than ever before. They not only care about the quality of the products and services they receive but they also care about how the companies they do business with behave. Do they make a difference in their communities? Do they treat their employees with dignity and respect? On the reverse side, we have also come to understand that the employee impact can go well beyond delivering better service because they are happy and have the tools they need to do their jobs. We realize that employees can become as powerful of brand advocates as customers and that employee advocates can be primary drivers of business success. In order to become brand advocates, employees need to be engaged on multiple levels. At the most basic level, employees must be happy with the company as a place to work. They must also understand and believe in the vision that the company has for how it will make a difference in the lives of its customers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the employee must understand how what they do fits into the larger vision of the company in order to feel connected to the company mission. In this article you will get a brief history of the evidence for the importance of employee engagement in a company’s success. You will also get practical ideas about how to begin or expand your journey as you engage your employees to be true brand advocates who feel a stake in the success of the company and want to deliver on its promise.

Today, organizations are focused on customer and employee experience. What does it feel like to be a customer, client, or employee of an organization? How something feels may seem like a soft and intangible concept, but customer satisfaction and employee engagement have direct impact on organizational results.

Maritz research shows nearly half (43 percent) of customers “break up” with brands over a poor customer experience. Regaining lost customers comes at a high cost and 77 percent of those defections are a direct result of employee attitude. Depending on your industry, these numbers could be higher or lower. There is obviously a relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction—and, more importantly, that relationship is entirely measurable.

In fact, according to Jack Welch, that relationship and how it impacts organizational goals may be all that is worth measuring:

“There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction and cash flow.”

The Core Measures Every CXO Needs to Manage the Business

Employee engagement and customer satisfaction determine cash flow. Employees who are motivated to do great work
and invested in their organization’s success will create better experiences for customers. Recall the common scenario of relating a poor customer service experience to friends or family members—recounts often include charades, interpretive dance, and performance art. After all, when people feel wronged as customers, it’s not unusual for them to tell everyone who will listen, sometimes for years to come.

Customer detractors are costly to an organization’s reputation and cash flow, and, unfortunately, detractors can be created by a single interaction with a disengaged employee.

Employees give life to the customer experience, and they can create powerful customer advocates when engaged at work.

Culture, Engagement, and Advocacy

Engaged employees serve customers better. Unfortunately, according to Gallup, 71 percent of employees are not engaged in their work.1 In the U.S. alone, Gallup estimates the cost of that disengagement is between $450 billion and $550 billion per year in lost customers, turnover, ineffciency, and more.2 To address low or dropping customer satisfaction, leaders must address engagement and company culture. When we say company culture, we don’t mean trendy perks or open offices, though those factors may influence culture.

What we mean when we talk about culture and engagement:

Culture: How things get done around here

Engagement: How people feel about the way things get done around here

Culture can include values, investment in employee compensation and benefits packages, programs like recognition or wellness, and much more. Employees who are in harmony with the company culture and satisfied in their work are more engaged in the work of satisfying customers and meeting individual and organizational goals. Only when employees are actively engaged they can become advocates of the organization and begin multiplying that same effect on customers by delivering the memorable, personal experiences that drive loyalty and advocacy.

Navigating the Engagement Spectrum

An advocate is someone who talks positively about an organization or product and passes on recommendations or positive messages about it to their friends and family. Many organizations use the Net Promoter Score (NPS®) system to measure satisfaction, which uses a single question to measure promoters, detractors, and neutral customers and employees. at question, paraphrased, is: How likely are you to recommend [organization or product] to your family and friends? Promoters within the NPS system are likely to become advocates for the organization or product. What’s been called the eNPS uses the same system to measure satisfaction and likeliness to advocate among employees.

Similarly, the engagement spectrum covers:

Disengaged → Engaged → Actively Engaged → Advocate

When employees act as advocates for an organization or product, they can, in turn, transform customers into advocates through genuine promotion of the organization that comes from true active engagement.

Three Practical Steps for Building Lasting Loyalty with Employees and Customers

Companies across all verticals are experiencing an engagement challenge with their two primary constituencies, employees and customers. While they are very different audiences who interact with different units (typically human resources and marketing, respectively), the solution to these challenges lies in integrating loyalty strategies to drive higher results for both groups of stakeholders.

No. 1 — Understand the Customer-Employee Connection

Customer interactions with employees have a far more powerful effect on retention than any programmatic strategy. Beyond the direct impact of employee attitudes on customer loyalty, it is also estimated that 70 percent of customer perception of a brand is determined by experiences with people.

We are moving from the digital age, where experiences were primarily trending toward transactional, to a human age, where attitudes, relationships and personal touch are valued at a premium for customers and employees alike.

No. 2 — Develop a Partnership Between HR and CCO

Success lies in creating a customer experience as a partnership between your Chief Customer Officer and HR. The opportunities for collaboration include developing strong brand communities both inside and outside the company. When employees are engaged and focused on an organization’s goals and delivering value to the customer, they understand the link between their own behaviors and a great customer experience. Stronger relationships equal stronger emotional bonds, loyalty and engagement.

Marketing has historically had an outward focus on the market, industry and sales. HR has historically had an inward focus
on employees, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, performance management, compensation, people policies, and, most recently, culture. While perspectives have historically been different, their goals have always been the same in brand commitment. Marketing seeks to elicit commitment from customers, whereas HR seeks to gain engagement and commitment from employees. What is now becoming clear is that each one is dependent on the other.

No. 3 — Measure the Results

Employee engagement tied into a customer loyalty strategy should be measured by the exact same metrics you would use for the loyalty program itself. This means linking employee behaviors directly to campaign response rates, lifts in spend, increased retention and new product trial. The power of integrating these two strategies will give a much clearer line of sight between what employees are doing and the impact on pro table customer behaviors. If data analysis can clearly show employee interaction improved the customer experience and that led to an incremental lift in a customer spend, the integration is working the way it should.

Increasingly, brands are trying to foster a sense of community. Therefore, having your employees contribute and participate in a brand community would increase the value of content, membership, and engagement—all fostering the employee and customer commitment, loyalty, and a lift in both retention and spend.

Look Inward First

Don’t leave the total customer experience up to chance. Instead, work toward winning the hearts and minds of your employees by supporting engagement. If you look internally first and put strategies and tactics in place to encourage engagement, your employees become your best advocates and customer loyalty will follow.

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4 Rules for Uncovering Insights in Any CX Dashboard

We’ve all been there.

You login to any reporting app and waiting for you is a picturesque dashboard full of metrics colorfully displayed in pie charts, bar graphs, and heat maps. After several minutes of glancing through them, you realize the hard truth: You have no idea what you’re looking at, and can’t decipher what these charts and graphs are telling you.

How do you take action when you can’t make sense of the constant influx of customer experience (CX) data that’s pouring in? Here are four rules for uncovering insights in your CX dashboard.

1. Dashboards are a launch pad—use them that way.

Your dashboards give you a pulse on how your business is doing. They are diagnostic tools and are intended to be used that way. When something doesn’t look right, and you’re seeing downward trends, your dashboard is there to help you dive deeper into the data to find the cause.

A well-built dashboard allows you quickly see all your data at a high level and then easily dive in deeper to locate root cause and create action. A dashboard is your first step in navigating through your CX data, so keep it simple and use it as a guide to creating a great customer experience.

2. Don’t cram too much into one dashboard.

Each department and role has metrics that are relevant to them. Knowing which metrics you’re held accountable for can help you build a dashboard that works for you. With a proper dashboard built for your specific use case you’re able to control what you’re measuring and what you compare it against.

A dashboard can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution—each department or team should have their own that contains only their metrics. If you get too many metrics on a dashboard, you end up feeling overwhelmed and spend too much time looking for the ones that matter to you.

Your dashboards should be custom and purposefully built to meet not only your CX program, but your role within your organization.

3. Stop comparing apples and oranges.

One of the biggest downfalls of a dashboard is making a chart or graph just for the sake of making one. While they make look flashy, comparing metrics that aren’t comparable is a surefire way to clutter up your dashboard and leave you confused at what the data is trying to tell you.

For example, you don’t want to compare corporate locations to franchise locations. Both fall under the same organization, but measure things differently. This could lead to confusion and a misunderstanding of what the data is telling you. Instead you want to compare metrics that fall under the same category, and that have the same values or units.

4. Structured and unstructured data belong together.

A successful dashboard consists of a mix of perception- and performance-based metrics that are pulled from both structured and unstructured data. Having only one of these data sets only gives you a small piece of the CX puzzle.

In the past, structured data was all you had to compare. But now, with today’s technology and vast amount of CX data available, you can begin drawing insights from unstructured data in ways that can have a huge impact on your business. Bringing together all types of CX data—including transactional, financial, contact, and demographic—next to your typical Voice of Customer data can provide the next level of actionable insights your business needs.

Your customers don’t care how you measure and track their interactions with your brand—but they do care how you act upon the insights that they give to you.

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Our product: What we’ve built, what’s next & why

As the co-pilots of Wootric’s product team, we’re excited to share all the progress we have made in the past twelve months, and also give you all a peek into what’s on the immediate horizon for Wootric.

Expanding our offering while boosting customer happiness

At Wootric we prioritize people, product, and process–in that specific order. At the end of day it’s people who build products and support our customers; process is there for people to be productive, not to get in their way. We are very pleased to see that in this competitive job market we have not only retained all our team members but have also grown the team to deepen our machine learning and big data prowess.

As you can imagine, we work hard to “walk the talk” of boosting customer happiness.  I’m happy to report that Wootric’s Net Promoter Score has improved 7 points year over year. We are especially proud of this trend as we have grown (rapidly) and the capabilities of our platform have developed exponentially. As we drive innovation in customer feedback management, our own customers — like Docusign, Mixpanel and Hootsuite — are seeing the value of our platform and the way we prioritize their success.

Wootric's NPS July 2017
Wootric’s own Wootric NPS Dashboard – July 2017

Ensuring our customers have the insights they need to improve customer experience

Now let’s talk about product. One sentence that would describe our evolution this past year? We have evolved from an Net Promoter Score survey tool to a platform that effortlessly turns all of your customer conversations into insights. In a world where customer experience is the new battlefield for competitive advantage, this empowers you, as a business, to shift from product-led growth to the holy grail of customer-led growth.

Here are new features to back up this evolution claim:

  • New survey types: Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey, in addition to NPS
  • New survey channels: Email and SMS, in addition to in-app web and mobile
  • New Integrations: Salesforce, Mixpanel, Intercom, Slack, Zendesk, Webhooks
  • Email Templates: Mailchimp, Intercom, Marketo, Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot, PersistIQ, Zoho, Amity
  • Survey respondent profiles
  • API your way to almost everything
  • Big Data warehousing through partnerships with Stitch Data and XPlenty
  • Accessibility improvement.  Wootric surveys, now compliant with Section 508 standards, can be filled out by the visually impaired — highly valued in education and government services.

Among these features, if we were to pick the two that most impact our customers’ growth, they would be (a) launching our Salesforce Managed Package on the AppExchange and (b) the integration with Intercom. Both Salesforce and Intercom are two-way integrations in which Wootric enriches your CRM and Customer Support software with customer feedback and at the same time allows you to trigger surveys to customers based on events in Salesforce and Intercom. This has a huge impact on renewal and upsells because your sales and success teams have more context into what your customers think of your product and services.

It’s been a fun challenge to keep a balance between new feature development and upgrading our infrastructure to handle our growth.  Our already ‘big data’ platform has exploded this year, with 300% growth in survey responses, and over 800% growth in REST API calls.  (To reiterate: API all the things!)  Our tech stack now includes Elastic Search, PostgreSQL, Redis, and several Amazon (AWS) and Google Cloud (GCP) services.  Our infrastructure and devops are ready to handle the growth we foresee in next 12 months.

But that’s all in the past!

Our current focus is to add more intelligence to our service.

We are working on being smarter about who to survey and when to survey so that you can converse with more of your customers. And, once we have your customers’ feedback, we will provide better and more automated insights through the use of artificial intelligence.

AI-powered insights trained by millions of survey responses

Because the survey data we receive is unstructured text, it’s a great use case for the meeting ground between machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Besides leveraging the Google Cloud Platform, we are creating our own industry-specific machine learning algorithms that analyze open-ended human-generated feedback.  CX Insight™, our text and sentiment analysis product–trained by millions of survey responses–focuses first on SaaS, e-commerce, and media use cases. As with all things Wootric, this has been a customer-led effort. Our customers expect that AI-powered insights will provide them with a game-changing ability to improve customer experience.

Wootric is at the forefront of a revolution in customer experience intelligence and we look forward to sharing this journey with you.  Thank you.

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

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

How Telecoms Can Drastically Improve CX (Lessons from Comcast)

It’s no secret that telecommunications companies have a difficult time pleasing their customers.

In fact, in a new study by InMoment, Customer Experience in the Telecom Industry, we found that no line of service (internet, mobile, etc.) ever fully bounces back from the customer satisfaction levels of the pre-one-year honeymoon phase. In other words, after year one, satisfaction goes downhill and never recovers.

So why aren’t telecoms meeting customers’ long-term expectations?

I recently sat down with my good friend Graham Tutton, the VP of Customer Insights at Comcast, to discuss what telecoms like Comcast are doing—or should be doing—to improve the customer experience (CX).

Make CX a strategic priority.

Graham acknowledged that Comcast is the 800-pound gorilla in the room of the legacy cable business. With a stock price that has tripled since 2010, it’s been a big winner on Wall Street. Yet, while Comcast has been winning in many ways, the leadership team recognized the importance of improving its brand image around the customer experience.

In 2014, Graham and others started making a deliberate shift in strategy to focus on CX. Comcast has a Chief Experience Officer and board-level support for prioritizing this focus, which is a keystone for any telecom that wants to make a significant improvement for its customers.

With this support in place, the question was, “How do we get scientific and strategic about moving the needle on CX?”

Give customers more control through transparency.

Telecom customers are notoriously disloyal. Millennials, in particular, are very fickle and cost-conscious. Even more so, they are value conscious. Telecoms must have the rational table stakes in place (price, quality, reliability, etc.) before customers will even consider sticking around.

Comcast discovered its customer churn was strongly correlated to its Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS), so the company performed an analysis to see what drivers were impacting that score. As Comcast looked at various stages of the relationship, from awareness to purchase to onboarding, they asked questions like, “What are the drivers during the onboarding process?” or “What are the drivers when issues like billing come up?”

Comcast found when it gave customers more visibility into things like prices, speeds, etc. that the customers felt more in control. That transparency was key to building customer trust and longer-term relationships.

If telecoms can set expectations up front, communicating both the positive and the negative (e.g., rate increases and the timeline for promotions)) the customer feels like they have enough control to make educated choices. Gone are the days when companies can hike up prices and send the customer a notification in the mail. The more explicit telecoms are in managing expectations, the happier customers will be, and the less they will have to call in about down the road (saving the customer time and the company money).

Consequently, over the past year, Comcast has seen a massive decrease in call volume—to the tune of around 20 million fewer calls. That’s improvement.

However, as telecoms educate and become more transparent with their customers, their employees will be required to resolve more complex issues.

Empower your employees.

It’s impossible to talk about comprehensive CX improvement without including employee engagement and feedback.

Moving closer to a people-first culture is a mammoth task in any company, let alone one like Comcast with 130,000 individuals working in the organization. Comcast went about changing its hiring practices at every level of the organization, and have made real improvements on learning from its employees and acting upon employee feedback. In fact, the NPS for Comcast’s employee engagement is up 20 points on average.

While call center employees may not be privy to the strategic business of high-level executives, they should be informed enough to be able to talk relevantly to customers about their situation, as well as feel empowered to make choices that will resolve the issues that come up.

At the end of the day, customers want reliable service and competitive pricing from a company they can trust. Telecoms should not feel like an enemy, but a partner in technology for consumers. When issues arise—as they will in any industry—employees must be empowered to make things right in a timely manner.

When this employee empowerment is combined with a transparency that gives greater control to the customer, telecoms have a mutual ground for resolving roadblocks to customer retention and satisfaction.

If you would like to learn more about improving CX in the telecommunications industry, download our new study here.

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3 Major Findings from Our New CX Telecom Report

Telecommunications companies (aka “telecoms”) have the most fickle customer relationships of any industry. Fair or not, telecommunications companies are the ones that consumers can’t live with—and most definitely can’t live without.

Consumer ire toward telecoms can largely be attributed to unaligned industry expectations. Today’s consumer holds telecoms to the same standard as other industries, which have much simpler business and delivery models. As a result, other industries such as retail and food service have fewer variables preventing them from providing positive customer experiences.

To gain a better understanding of where the telecom industry stands in terms of customer experience (CX), InMoment’s team of data scientists conducted a study of 11,000+ consumers regarding their experiences with telecom providers.  

Here are three major findings from our Customer Experience in the Telecom Industry report:

1. That one-year mark is critical.

As with any consumer/brand connection, there are key benchmarks that make—or break—the relationship. For telecoms, that benchmark is the one-year anniversary when consumers typically recollect their experiences with your brand throughout the year and determine whether or not your organization has done enough to earn brand loyalty.

According to our study, “Satisfaction decreases universally for the first time at the one-year mark, no matter the line of service. The same pattern occurs with a customer’s likelihood to recommend.”

2. Customers are harder to impress the second time around.

There are many reasons customers might switch internet, TV, or mobile phone providers. Whether it was slow internet speed or rude support staff, each poor experience of a switching customer puts pressure on telecoms to provide a comparably better experience. And one thing is clear across all service lines: New customers who switch from other providers bring an expectation of a better experience.

However, our study finds that those customer don’t always find greener grass on the other side of the provider fence.  

3. People still like people.

According to the study, “With the exception of landlines, customers across all service lines who’d had a personal interaction with a brand representative reported higher satisfaction levels than those who had not.”

Like most industries, staff engagement is absolutely key in a provider’s ability to positively impact customers. And while chatbots and other automated technologies are a hot topic right now, those solutions should be implemented in very specific scenarios, and always in balance.

Telecom providers who focus attention and resources on empowering humans to resolve customer concerns will fix an obvious but prevalent problem in the overall engagement and satisfaction of their customers.

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