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2025 Consumer Experience Trends

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Airport Series: Charlotte and Customer Complaints

Charlotte blends Southern charm into the hustle and bustle of a major international airport. However, this balance doesn't always go as planned. As the ninth busiest airport in the country, Charlotte Douglas International Airport can profit from listening to the voice of its customers.

More than 40 million people travel through North Carolina’s Charlotte Douglas International Airport each year, and it remains one of the most consistently least-liked airports. Today, we find out why.

Charlotte Douglas should invest in ADA training

An overview of our analysis indicates that this airport in part suffers because of specific airlines and their employees, weather delays, and a few other things they realistically have no control over. Still, there are plenty of areas where the airport could take steps to improve the customer experience. All they have to do is start listening to their customers.

Charlotte Douglas is compliant with guidelines required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, but some of the most vociferous complaints came from people with disabilities or their family. One woman said she and her traveling partner, a disabled veteran, were left “high and dry” at the gate. Another reviewer reveals that her daughter, who suffers from spina bifida, was forced to walk to the parking area and denied access to a “vacant wheelchair” designated for public use.

With text analytics, airport officials could find the commonalities in these complaints and fix them for the future. These reviews suggest that Charlotte Douglas should invest in ADA training for their staff. They also need to better inform their guests about what accessibility options are available. Simpler still, increased signage highlighting the way for guests with disabilities would do much to alleviate some of these complaints.

Racial undertones at Charlotte Douglas

“Enjoyed the small quiet chapel and the piano player. Soothing amidst chaos,” one reviewer wrote. Another cited the rocking chairs and the piano as why Charlotte Douglas was “the most-relaxed airport” she’d ever visited. However, this veneer of southern charm is thin, especially when one considers the history of race relations in the American south.

The airport recently shut down their bathroom attendant program. The restroom tradition was controversial for many reasons, not least of which involved the former Confederate state’s history. Without diving into the socio-political issues at the heart of that debate, text analytics could have shown airport officials that people generally hated the service. A number of customers cited it as their “only complaint” about the airport. Still more comments from customers cited the presence of the attendant as off-putting.

Some didn’t appreciate that the attendants worked for tips, especially since they didn’t want the attendants’ help in the first place.

Others, however, did notice racist undertones to the bathroom attendant program. One reviewer, who advised travelers to avoid Charlotte-Douglas “at all costs,” merely pointed out that the attendants were black men every single time, letting the implication speak for itself. Another reviewer was more direct. “Bathroom attendants are tacky, especially when the bathroom is filthy. Would it not be a better use of time to clean said bathroom rather than perpetuate an antiquated form of southern privileged genteelism?” this person wrote. All of the comments typified a myopic and disconnected management style. Text analytics could have helped identify and eliminate this problem before it became a hot-button issue.

Attitude issues

This leads to what is clearly the biggest problem for Charlotte Douglas: the attitude of its staff and those working for airlines, rental companies, and in other airport fixtures. More than 800 reviews, or four out of every five we looked at, make some mention of customer service or airport staff. Only rarely were these mentions positive.

This is a major problem for any business, but especially for airports. If you look back to our Atlanta analysis, you’ll see that airport staff were often the saving grace for customers. When airline staff were overworked or simply rude, employees of the airport stepped in to assist in customer service. At Charlotte Douglas, this is not the case.

So, even though some airports don’t get a fair shake when it comes to flights being delayed because of weather or other extraneous circumstances, our analysis shows that airport staff could do more to alleviate their guests’ stress and frustration with just a minor shift in their attitude. Increased training for employees and signage aimed at working with guests who have special needs would also ease a pressing issue. Finally, more charming, restful areas like the rocking chairs and piano could take Charlotte from the bottom of everyone’s lists to the top.  

Listen and improve

The people who travel in and out of Charlotte Douglas International Airport every day are desperately telling officials how they can improve their service, in very detailed and colorful ways. By listening to these guests, officials can determine the best solutions to these problems. However, without text analytics, there is no effective way to hear them in the first place.

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How Does Geography Impact Customer Experience?

Geography affects enterprise feedback management. Find out how brand perception and customer satisfaction vary from country to country.

CX programmes are adopted by many organisations across the globe, each with a different approach and ultimate goal. Whilst the concept of CX is namely the same wherever you look, we’re really interested to see and share how it’s interpreted across different countries.

In our CX Trends Study we compared customer experiences in the UK and Germany, two major European economies. We delved into what emotions consumers and brands associate with positive and negative experiences, loyalty and personalisation.

We found that emotion plays a huge part when it comes to CX. As customers, we base our experiences on whether something makes us happy, sad or even indifferent. What emotions do we feel when we have a positive experience? Do we feel satisfied, important or reassured? Our survey identified that 35% of consumers in the UK felt safe and reassured when they had a positive experience in comparison to 40% in Germany.

Whilst it makes sense to feel reassured when we are happy with something, we saw a higher percentage of Germans (13%) who felt excitement when they had a positive experience, with an underwhelming 2.5% of UK consumers experiencing the same emotion. The question is, why is there such a stark difference in this particular emotion? Do Germans express more emotion than Brits? Do they have different values in the exchange process which means their expectations might be lower than neighbouring countries? Or are British people simply harder to please?

Our study also showed that over 20% of British consumers surveyed ranked reassurance as one of their top emotions associated with loyalty to a brand. In comparison, this halves in Germany to 10%. That said, enjoyment and excitement remain significantly higher in Germany than in the UK.

Looking at negative experiences, the differences between UK and German consumers were similarly as stark. When asked what emotions they most associate with something negative, 34% of German consumers said anger was their primary emotion, in comparison with 8% of Brits. In addition, open-ended comments such as “burning anger and hatred” were received by consumers in Germany — some of the most emotive comments submitted in the report.

The CX Trends Study provided lots of rich and valuable statistics from across several different countries helping us to understand the true emotions of our consumers. In a world where expectations are constantly changing, it’s vital that brands stay in tune with their customers’ ever evolving emotions. From this, we can start to understand and learn that some consumers are more emotive in their reactions and develop their CX approach appropriately.

No two customers are the same which is why different CX programmes must cater for all, wherever they are globally. Without this guidance, brands and customers really will be ‘worlds apart’. We’d love to hear your views — have you encountered these differences? Have you been surprised by the nuances in global customer expectations?

We’ll be exploring these differences and more in our next CX Trends study, which will be published early 2018.

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Airport Series: Atlanta and Wayfinding

Not only is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport the busiest airport on earth, its "plane train" is the busiest rail system in America. This volume means Atlanta International needs to run with near flawless perfection. In this analysis, we learn exactlty how they can make strides toward that goal.

So, here’s the thing: few people are happy when they’re in airports. Whether it’s for business or pleasure, packing everything, checking in, and running to make your flight are all experiences that are generally negative. At least, that’s how I feel when sprinting through indistinguishable terminals looking for my connecting flight – and Atlanta International Airport is no exception.

Figure 1: This combination word cloud displays the top themes, entities, and categories along with their overall sentiment for Atlanta International

There are no shortage of listicles and videos online “rating” airports from best to worst. Yet, what does that really mean? Here at InMoment we focus on data and methodology, and Semantria can answer this question by mining Facebook comments, online reviews, and other data from people’s first-hand experiences.

Sentiment analysis for Atlanta International Airport

For example, we processed more than 2,759 Facebook reviews for the Atlanta International Airport, clocking in at 5,000 more words than Pride and Prejudice. That’s a lot of reviews, and it allows for very clear themes to emerge. Airport leadership regularly balances budget between marketing and infrastructure, this is where text analytics comes in. Text analytics allows airport leadership to prioritize projects based on customer experience impact. As we’ll find out, often enhancing customer experience requires little overhead. Addressing feedback directly and communicating progress through legacy channels and social media connects customers to the brand by showing them the airport is listening. The product we used for this project is the web based dashboard, Spotlight.

Feedback for Atlanta: Wayfinding

What was the most frequently occurring feedback for Atlanta? Quite simply, wayfinding.“Wayfinding” refers to the way in which people orient themselves in a space to get from one place to the next. At the Atlanta Airport, customers rely on the Air Train to get from the gates to the baggage claim, which can be literally miles away from the gate. So, without clear signage for the train, guests are compelled to walk this distance. Wayfinding related feedback is so vociferous that in over several hundred reviews guests outright advise fliers to avoid Atlanta International Airport entirely. One season traveler shared feedback the following on the ATL Facebook page recently:

“Back when I was traveling a few hundred thousand air miles a year, I avoided this airport like a third world dirt airstrip. Twenty five years later it still has lousy signage, crazy long distances to walk and takes forever to go from point A to point B to say nothing of the crowds.”

When airport architecture is effective, getting from “point A to point B” should be snappy, despite size or crowds. Jim Harding of Gersham Smith & Partners helped design Atlanta’s International Terminal. He asserts that Hartsfield–Jackson is architected with intuitive design in mind:

“We have a set of visual cues that naturally lead and guide you through a big, open space. And it’s a big part of your journey segment… you have lighting that goes up, and over, and down; you have flooring that pulls you in and through. The two come together and point you to the plane that you see through the glass. So this design is very carefully thought out, making that customer experience easy, natural, fluid, intuitive.”

When contrasted next to the true customer experience, which here is represented as natural language data, we can see there’s a chasm between the architect’s intent and how it’s experienced. This is cause for alarm for the airport company, as a lost customer is less likely to have time to engage with third party vendors, impacting precious non-aeronautical revenue.

“It took entirely too long to get to my next gate. There was a mile walk without the train…. With knee problems, pain wasn’t suppose[d] to be a part of my plane ride,” one guest wrote.

Figure 2: Wayfinding over time. This represents volume and sentiment over time for a segment of the data set

Using sentiment analysis we can understand that spaces are too large and confusing. Jim Harding and his team no doubt delivered an admirable design. However, customers still find the spaces at Atlanta cavernous and unstructured enough to be overwhelming. Signage must increase throughout the facility. Customers complain of the less than intuitive design outside as well. Says one reviewer:

“Worst uber/Lyft pickup process ever and terrible signage. I walked alone in a parking lot for an hour before I found it.”

Another, this time a local, confronts one of the airport company’s richest sources of non-aeronautical revenue, parking:

“I’ve been living in Atlanta for 2yrs now. It is a bit confusing. The parking is horrific! Not enough signs for direction and the plane train was definitely anxiety because I didn’t know where the heck it was taking me.”

Saving grace: airport staff

Atlanta International Airport Theme Volume Versus NPS
Figure 3: Overall Theme Sentiment for the Atlanta Facebook dataset, compared against NPS scores pulled from Facebook’s star rating system

Yet, our analysis also revealed that airport staff can be the saving grace for unhappy customers. One guest pointed out that Delta airline staff were both rude and unhelpful. However, that guest was ultimately helped by an airport maintenance worker to, you guessed it, help find the way to the baggage claim. Another airport employee took a struggling guest to the baggage claim in a wheelchair. Yet another guest described how an airport employee named Timothy not only helped her to the baggage claim, but assisted her in securing a rental car after that company’s employees were “no help.”

Perhaps best of all is an an airport employee who brightens peoples’ spirits while they wait for the bags. As one guest wrote, “I’ve been through this Airport several times. No complaints. I must say I like the man downstairs by baggage claim. Always a song, story and always wanting to give information.” The person-to-person connections travelers make with these employees colors the entire narrative of their experience with the airline and the airport itself.

How Atlanta should act

These are details that stakeholders wouldn’t get from a star-rating or the possibly anecdotal experience of a journalist or reviewer. By simply improving signage and other wayfinding techniques, Atlanta can alleviate myriad pain points on the customer side. On the enterprise side, airport officials can effectively communicate expectations and feedback with their airline tenants, such as Delta and their unhelpful staff. This can build trust between stakeholders and the airlines, and improve the experience for everyone.

All this, just from listening to the customers in a way that allows airports to really hear what they are saying. And best of all? I ran this analysis with no extra tuning in just a couple of minutes, using our Semantria for Excel add-in.

Do more with sentiment analysis

Little experiments like these are some of the fun things we can do with our sentiment analysis tools. Of course, we don’t want to hog all of the fun for ourselves. If you have questions of your own, turn to our website and resources collection. You can plumb the depths of modern text analytics for answers to all sorts of questions, even crazy ones you come up with in the shower. And be sure to get in touch with any specific queries you have!

Until then, check out our next analysis of Charlotte Douglas International! 

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5 Lessons from Forbes’ Most Engaged Companies

Five lessons you can learn from companies that excel in customer engagement and creating positive experiences.

We live in the era of easy access to information. With a few clicks, customers can evaluate products and services, compare prices and make a purchase. Customers hold more power in the relationship than ever before. With this dynamic at play, how do you stand out? To truly differentiate your brand, you must build meaningful customer engagement — proactive, deliberate, and measurable — across the entire customer journey.

The benefits of truly engaging your customers are tangible. According to Forbes Insights, who in association with Pegasystems Inc., recently released its inaugural “50 Most Engaged Companies” list, leaders in customer engagement are:

  • 4x more likely to experience growth of more than 10 percent
  • 3x more likely to be in the top quartile of “Net Promoter Score”
  • 3x more likely to see high acquisition rates
  • More likely to experience a churn rate of 10 percent or less

What can we learn from customer engagement leaders? Here are five lessons from the likes of Amazon, Alphabet, Starbucks and Foot Locker that can help your company start building more meaningful customer engagement immediately.

Align Your Organization for Customer Engagement

Customer engagement doesn’t happen by accident. According to Forbes Insights, “Leaders invest more in staff resources to focus on customer engagement, which includes hiring, training and enablement.” Furthermore, engagement leaders are more likely to have a dedicated executive accountable for customer engagement.

A customer-centric culture begins at the top, and only from there can change and improvement take place. When someone with political power advocates for the customer, you ensure that changes are lasting, impactful and truly representative of what your customers want.

Take a Data Driven Approach

Interactions with your customers are more meaningful when driven by data, and the ability to proactively tailor and personalize these interactions requires analysis of customer data. Interestingly, it is not data volume that separates customer engagement leaders from followers, but an ability to derive meaning and insights from data that already exists.

More leaders (52 percent) than followers (43 percent) choose a customer engagement strategy based on insights gained from customer-related technologies. Leveraging leading technology partners enable you to collect, analyze and distribute insights that improve customer interactions.

Focus on Business Impact

Customer experience and engagement are often viewed as “soft” business objectives, but for companies that excel in these areas, that’s simply not the case. In fact, these companies are keenly focused on business results. “Their approach is also more long term, as customer lifetime value is more important to them than it is for brands that are less engaged,” according to the list.

ROI and business impact are more difficult to tease out of data that was created without a specific business objective or goal in mind. Architect solutions that measure predefined business cases to ensure your efforts have meaningful — and quantifiable — results. Use these results to adjust your engagement practices as needed, reevaluate and adjust again. Remember: that which is measured improves, and that which is measured continuouslyimproves exponentially.

Engage Holistically

Customer engagement only works when implemented in a way that customers find useful. Shep Hyken writes on Forbes.com, “In the end, the customer doesn’t care about how many channels you make available to them. They just want to buy the way they want to buy, have their questions answered, their problems solved and their comments acknowledged. It doesn’t matter what channel. So, why do we keep talking about different channels? It’s really about connecting and responding to the customer.”

Is your approach creating a disjointed experience for your customers? Do you offer consistent service across all channels? Focusing on the entire customer journey — no matter which channels the customer uses — is critical to building more meaningful customer engagements.

Stay Human (While Innovating)

Both leaders and followers leverage technology to more efficiently engage with customers. There is, however, a major difference in which technology they use. Leaders are significantly more likely than followers to use technology that mimics human interaction, such as chatbots, virtual assistants and video support. In addition, leaders invest more heavily in technology that allows for always-on, automated learning from their customer interactions and use these insights to engage customers in more intelligent, useful and proactive ways.

Whether implementing these strategies will require a subtle shift — or dramatic changes — for your company, one thing is certain: with a committed investment of time and resources, any brand can build a leading customer engagement program that drives measurable business results.

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Customer Expectations on a Global Scale

Learn how to manage customer expectations by understanding how preferences vary by industry, geography, and more.

In today’s connected world, managing a customer’s expectation and consistently creating positive experiences has proven to be a challenge for many organisations.

Part of the challenges in customer experience can be attributed to a variance in preferences across different industries and geographies. A recent study conducted by the UK Institute of Customer Service (UKCI) revealed that customer needs for specific types of services vary by industry, country, and channel.

Importance of understanding customer differences across sectors

In the modern business context, a healthy customer experience initiative is defined by a brand’s commitment to both satisfying customers and motivating strong loyalty. This in turn requires a firm to have a strong understanding of wide-ranging customer expectations.

Today, customers expect excellent experiences from their bank, insurance provider, mobile operator, and even their electricity supplier. However, priorities and expectations of what is considered excellent vary across industries.

For instance, staff competencies are considered particularly important in the banking and insurance industries while speed of resolving complaints, product reliability, and accessibility is a top priority in retail.

However, amidst these varying expectations, there is one shared ideology that prevails — there is no business without customers. Understanding customer expectations is therefore a prerequisite to delivering a superior service which can in turn create brand advocates and prolonged customer loyalty.

In fact, a study by Wunderman found that a staggering 79 percent of customers base their initial purchase intent on how efficiently a brand understands and cares about them. Suffice to say, understanding customer expectations is a crucial ingredient to the success or failure of a business.

Different customer expectations across countries

It is imperative that customer service representatives are aware of the diverse requirements in different countries and cultures. It is especially vital for companies that wish to expand their operations globally. Understanding disparities in customer priorities will invariably help companies identify strengths and opportunities for improvement and differentiation.

These priorities can vary from price, quality, and physical presence of a representative. For instance, customers in Japan have very high expectations of customer service and do not expect to pay for it. Accordingly, service providers in Japanese markets are expected to go out of their way to serve customers and solve problems.

If a customer seeks out phone support in Japan and is dissatisfied with the outcome, the company will more often than not send someone to help them out. This may not always be expected from companies in countries like the UK or US.

Furthermore, a 2014 Global Customer Service Barometer Report by American Express revealed that 78 percent of US customers rate being connected to someone who is knowledgeable as important, whilst only 65 percent of customers in the UK agreed with this. Moreover, a study conducted by New Voice Media found only 25 percent of Americans will hold while on the phone after 10 minutes, compared to 64 percent of Brits, for whom it is a regular occurrence.

Understanding wavering emotions

Existing UKCSI research notes considerable differences in how customers describe emotions associated with positive experiences. The research showed Danish customers, for example, predominantly using the verbatim “they had what I was looking for” while Spanish customers usually stated “I am satisfied with doing what I came to do.”

Respondents were further analysed to understand which emotions they associate with brands to which they feel the most loyal. Most customers across the countries analysed rated “satisfaction” as the most common emotion they associate with brand loyalty.

Around 20 percent of UK customers associated being safe and reassured with brand loyalty, while only 17 percent of US customers agreed with this. “Entertained” was the lowest-ranked emotion overall. However, 11 percent of Finnish customers chose this emotion — nearly twice as many as the nearest customer group from another region. Meanwhile, customers in France and Finland ranked ‘excited’ higher than in other countries.

The research also suggests customers across Europe share many of the same priorities but there are also a number of nuanced priorities by each country. Differences in the way customers score each priority out of ten was also noted. For example, there is less than an average differentiation in the range of priority scores in Poland, with less than one point difference between the highest rated priority (condition of delivered goods)  and the lowest (organisation contributes to the national economy).

Communicating using the right channels

Most companies today use multiple channels to interact with customers. This has been made easier with the rapid increase in technology and the advent of social media. However, customers across different industries and countries have varied preferences on how they wish to communicate with service professionals.

For instance, banking customers prefer a complete omni-channel experience with physical branches, online banking, mobile apps, text notifications, and phone calls. However, customer expectations with a healthcare company may not go beyond the ability to contact the company via phone and receive a text with reminders of upcoming appointments.

In the UK, UKCSI research revealed that website use is higher than the European average, although this is not uniformly the case across sectors. Website use is particularly high in telecommunications, media, insurance, and utilities, but is slightly less than average for banking, retail (food), and transport. In the Netherlands, “in person” is used less than the European average, although it is still the most popular channel for interacting with organisations.

Acknowledging preferred personalisation levels

In recent years, personalisation strategies have grown in importance and have seen a significant impact on levels of advocacy and loyalty customers have towards a brand. In fact, customers today do not just expect but demand tailored services that suit personal preferences.

They also want e-commerce sites and in-person sales associates to know who they are and offer relevant assistance. UKCSI’s recent survey recognised this fact, as “personalised support” emerged as a prime priority over purchase and advertising.

The report further indicated that customers in North America and the UK chose personalised support even more often than average at 54 percent and 53 percent, respectively. Moreover, 41 percent of customers in Spain value personalisation during the purchase process highest of all countries, a full six points above the average of 35 percent, while German customers weighted the different types of personalisation most equally.

It is imperative that companies today understand and respond to not just a customer’s buying habits and incomes, but also their emotions and states of mind. Acknowledging these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them is undoubtedly important in ensuring that customer satisfaction is more than just a slogan but also an attainable goal.

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4 Reasons the In-Store Customer Experience Still Matters in Retail

Will automation and digital disruption push brick-and-mortar retailers out of the picture? Customer experience management in retail is changing but it’s not dead.

It’s one of the most popular and controversial topics in retail today: Will automation and digital disruption push people and brick-and-mortar retailers out of the picture?

While there are many advocates for either side of the debate, here at InMoment, we believe that the in-store experience is just as relevant today, despite the digital age we live in. In fact, in our recent Humans v. Robots webinar with CustomerThink.com, Brennan Wilke, senior vice president of customer experience at InMoment, and Tyler Saxey, director of customer experience for Foot Locker, discussed the reasoning and research behind our opinion.

Based on findings from InMoment’s 2017 Retail Trends Report, our presenters shared several great reasons while the in-store experience still plays an important role in the retail industry:

1. Immediate Gratification

For customers, one of the biggest draws to a physical store is instant gratification. They can walk through the doors, see the selection, grab something off the shelf, and buy it.

With an in-store purchase, customers can enjoy their new items the moment they walk out the door. This type of satisfaction is simply not possible for the digital-only customer, who needs to wait for shipping and processing even after the transaction is complete. For the eager customer, brick-and-mortar retailers are still the way to go.

2. Previous Good Experiences

Another advantage for physical retailers is that they can build upon previous positive experiences. If a customer has gone to a store and has had an employee go above and beyond for them, they are more likely to make the trip again. Why? Because their previous experience made them feel important and valued; who wouldn’t like that?

If retailers are able to empower their staff to provide good experiences for customers, they can essentially guarantee customer loyalty.

3. Perceived Quality

In our research for the 2017 Retail Trends Report, we found that retail customers tend to perceive the quality of in-store goods to be greater than that of items bought online. Even though the items may be the same and in the same condition, the ability for clients to see, touch, and hold the items in their hands assures the customer that the item they are buying is exactly what they want.

Online retailers can’t provide the same sort of assurance, so when customers are especially concerned with quality, they are more likely to make the trip to a physical retailer.

4. The Human Element

The final and most important reason why in store retailers have an edge in their industry might be the most obvious: their people. The fact of the matter is that as social beings, we still prefer and value quality, interpersonal interactions.

When a customer speaks with a sales associate, they get to check items off their shopping list and connect with someone who will help them find what they need. This gives a sales transaction a priceless social element, and as I stated previously, it’s those personal relationships and experiences that keep customers coming back for more.

In light of these key in store differentiators, it’s clear that brick-and-mortar locations still have their place in the retail industry. In this case, it is important not to solely focus your efforts on digital resources, but instead to think about how you can use technology to empower your people.

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Retailers Are Dabbling in Facial Recognition

Retailers are beginning to utilize facial recognition technology to stop negative customer experiences before they start.

Walmart is the latest retailer testing facial recognition technology in an effort to create a better customer experience. Customer experience (CX) expert Brennan Wilkie says that facial recognition will be a key technology moving forward in the personalization of shopping.

“Installing facial recognition monitors in stores has the potential to grant retailers insight into the in-store customer experience,” Wilkie, the senior vice president of customer experience strategy at InMoment, told FierceRetail. “They can use it to determine, for example, whether customers are frustrated during self check-out and notify staff to respond with triage, pre-empting complaints and ultimately attrition.”

Retailers can then pair the facial expression data with customer demographics, loyalty metrics and other product purchase information, a brand can gain a deep understanding of the consumer.

“This intelligence could fuel action across the organization, from targeting demographics differently, to increasing access to self check-out, to deploying human talent at the specific points along the customer journey where they increase value,” he added.

However, Wilkie warns that Walmart and other retailers will need to be cautious as they test and implement these new tools in order to avoid crossing the line of customer privacy with this new tool. To address this, brands must be transparent about where, when and why they’re using this new technology, and of course, offer value in return for this privacy invasion.

There are several other challenges associated with using facial recognition. For example introducing new data when companies are already swimming in Big Data and struggling to derive value from it.

“Having a strong strategy for how to manage, access, analyze and action the information will is paramount,” Wilkie said. “Practically, there may be pushback from customers who are uncomfortable with the idea of their in-store actions being not only recorded by facial recognition monitors (often already done for security purposes), but observed and analyzed for business strategy reasons. If retailers can communicate the overall benefits of the technology as they roll it out, any negative feedback should be outweighed by the positive. This strategy has worked well with newly introduced in-store technology, such as self-checkout lines and chip readers, in the past.”

Another concern related to this infant technology is that there is the potential for the data to be misread. Therefore, the analytics software needs to be very sophisticated to be able to get results off of reading a customer’s expression.

The final challenge will be knowing when a retailer should implement new changes based on localized behaviors.

“Regionally, customer demographic preferences can differ. This should be considered as CX changes are implemented at scale as a result of learned insights from the technology,” he said.

So which retailers should be leading the way with facial recognition?

Wilkie recommends retailers with Millennials as their main demographic since study findings show that Millennials are most comfortable with the idea of sharing personal data with companies as a means to using their products or services. Additionally, retailers who are testing out the incorporation of robot assistance for processes such as self-checkout and self-price check are great candidates for using facial recognition.

“By better understanding a customer’s reactions at every point in their customer journey, retailers can assess the ideal balance of human and tech at each customer touchpoint. They may find that their demographic of customers prefers the traditional experience, unlike other retailers with more connected consumers as customers,” Wilkie said.

Using facial recognition technology for CX insights is still in its early stages. Advancements in software will add a new layer of understanding of the CX for retailers.

“Written feedback, voice feedback and body language will be the holy trinity to delivering a robust customer experience once facial recognition technology is mastered,” he added.

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3 Common Myths About CX in Retail

Explore three myths in retail customer experience, debunk a few of these retail myths and find the truths beneath them.

Every culture has its popular myths: Bigfoot, the abominable snowman… the list goes on. However, when we think of these mythical monsters, we think of stories that are believable but generally acknowledged to be untrue when examined closely.

In terms of myths, retail culture is no different. With rapidly changing technology and evolving customers, many myths about the future of retail have surfaced. In InMoment’s 2017 Retail Trends Report, we were able to debunk a few of these retail myths and find the truths beneath them. Check them out below!

Myth No. 1: Convenience is King.

Fact: Convenience has its place, and it’s not always first.

Today’s customers favor instant gratification, so it’s no surprise that digital-exclusive retailers are performing the best in terms of customer satisfaction. If convenience was king, it would mean that these ecommerce giants would take the retail crown, but our data shows that brick-and-mortar retailers can still serve an important and distinct role through customer experience.

A physical location provides customers with the opportunity to touch and handle items before purchasing, something that is simply not possible for digital-exclusive retailers. For example, you wouldn’t want to buy a new pair of shoes without trying them on first; brick-and-mortar stores give you the opportunity to do just that.

Even more, consumers perceived product quality to be higher when they buy from a brick-and-mortar retailer, proving that while convenience is great, it isn’t everything.

Myth No. 2: Automation will replace employees.

Fact: Technology can enhance, but not replace, human interactions.

While automation may make it easier for customers to complete purchases, it is not capable of creating empathetic and positive customer experiences in the same way your employees are. Your employees are the face of your brand, an irreplaceable asset, so instead of pitting technology against them, retailers would be well advised to think of ways to use automation to support their employees.

Myth No. 3: Personalization means targeted campaigns.

Fact: Personalization must be authentic.

Targeted campaigns are great strategies, but personalized interactions generally mean more to customers than personalized messages; customers value moments more than advertisements. Brands must leverage sales and service touchpoints by enabling their employees to build relationships and deliver value to their customers. This effort will translate personalized marketing efforts into authentic and effective campaigns.

When thinking about the future of your retail CX efforts, don’t be tempted to change course because of these myths. Instead, stay focused on your customers and what they need, then go from there!

If you’d like more context on retail trends and the direction retail customer experience is heading, download the full 2017 Retail Trends Report!

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Who Should Own Renewal? Customer Success Experts Share the Pros & Cons of 3 Different Models

A year has gone by, and it’s time for SaaS subscription renewal. Who reaches out to close the renewal, the Account Executive, CSM or Account Manager?

In two words, it depends. In five words, it depends and will change.

In order to ensure your company’s growth and reputation, you need a harmonious ecosystem of teams with proper compensation and incentives to fit the size and nature of your company. Upsells and renewals come as a natural result of successful adoption. Making sure your CSMs can perform optimally results in an easier job for whoever you chose to own the “commercial” aspects of the customer relationship.

During August’s Customer Success Meetup in San Francisco, Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess, Angeline Felix, Customer Success Manager at New Relic, and Sylvia Kuyel, Customer Success Strategic & International Lead at Cloudflare, discussed the different facets of three ownership models at their own organizations and from previous experience. Most SaaS companies will fall under one of three models: the account executive owning the renewal, the CSM owning the renewal, or an account manager owning the renewal, and all three have their perks and problems.

Model 1: The Account Executive/ Sales owns the expansion and renewal

The first model they discussed was the model where the account executive owns the renewal and all the “commercial” parts of the client relationship. Dave Blake, who has seen all three models, says that organizations where the renewal process is complex, or where you’re dealing with large accounts with labor and resource intense negotiations would do best under this model. The key to making this model work is fostering a strong, collaborative relationship between the AE and the CSM. He has seen teams fall into the trap of the AE treating the CSM like a secretary or administrator, which creates resentment and does not add any value for the organization’s customers.

A problem that can happen within this model is that AEs, in their sales mindsets, can start neglecting their current client base in order to pursue the next potential customer. At New Relic, Angeline Felix has a system where if a customer downgrades, a “spot-back” is on their record, meaning AEs “get dinged…it’s in their best interest to stay engaged, continuing the relationship through the entire customer life cycle, and through the adoption phase.”

In Sylvia Kuyel’s experience at Cloudflare, “in our early stages we were one bundled product, which means there’s not a lot of upsell. AEs will naturally be interested in large accounts because they see one business unit and then they want the ins to the additional ones.”

You can also run into the opposite problem, where AEs have an easier job expanding in their existing customer base, focus too much on them, and stop going after new logos, which is what happened at ClientSuccess. They fixed this by changing the comp plan for the AEs to push them to hunt new logos.

Model 2: The Customer Success Manager owns expansion and renewal

Discussion then led to the second model, where the CSM owns all of the relationship, including expansion and renewal. Dave Blake has been seeing this model across the industry more and more and this is the model that Cloudflare follows. Coming from a venture capitalist background, Sylvia knows that when valuing a company, people look at how risky their recurring revenue is and the heavy influence customer success has on this. She emphasized that the main reason this works for Cloudflare is that all their customers are on auto-renew contracts with a 60-day notice period.

“ The key to success here is fairly straightforward renewals that aren’t high maintenance, and the experience and maturity of your CS team. Some teams don’t have the negotiating experience or want that pressure.” Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess

Even though this is the majority of their customers, she says that when dealing with large accounts with long complex initial negotiations, it makes sense to bring in the AE because they have all the contacts, and they negotiate every day. They have a long standing relationship with the AE, even though renewal is truly a customer success number.

“As long as you’ve done a good job of driving the adoption along the way, the renewal itself is not a negotiation process.” Sylvia Kuyel, Customer Success Strategic & International Lead at Cloudflare

All three CSMs in the latest panel for the Customer Success Meetup felt strong ownership over expansion and renewal. According to Erica Pearson from Periscope Data, “ I own it all; it is my relationship with the client. I am their partner.” Their job is to get their clients value, with renewal being part of the CSM’s reward for doing the job right. Cloudflare recognizes the heavy workload that is involved when CSMs own everything. They set a global CS team goal that contributes to their comp but it is not individual. They do not want CSMs getting possessive over their accounts, and this encourages them to help each other out when one CSM has a particularly heavy day or week.

Many are hesitant to have CSMs own expansion and renewal because they fear that CSMs will lose the “trusted adviser” role, but Dave, Angeline and Sylvia all disagree with this based on experience. Customers tend to prefer having the trusted adviser to talk to about the commercial aspects, rather than bringing in a sales rep. They want someone who knows their business and if the commercial interactions are done right, CSMs can actually gain more trust as an adviser.

Model 3: A separate sales team of Account Managers own expansion and renewal

This last model brings in a third party into the organization’s ecosystem, a dedicated team of Account Managers who specialize in expansion and renewal. There is an undeniable benefit of specialization that comes with this model, letting AEs focus on new logos and CSMs focus on adoption. However, none of the experts at August’s Meetup were keen on this model, even having seen other companies successfully use it.  Dave and Angeline found that customers are overwhelmed, having so many introductions and relationships to maintain. Sylvia suggested that if there is noticeable tension between the trusted adviser role and the commercial duties, then this is the model for you. It’s important to clearly delineate the duties among these three roles, with appropriate comp and incentives to drive the individuals in these roles.

Lana Pucket, a CSM at WalkMe gave insight into her experience with this model and relationship during the most recent Customer Success Meetup, saying that she executes the entire lead up to the renewal, but the AM comes in to handle the renewal contract. She noted that 20% of her salary is based on renewals, tying her salary to a number that she does not own according to the roles within her organization.

Having previously managed an AM team, Angeline says this model worked at that unnamed company, but you have to think about the type of person you are hiring for each role. The AM needs a balance between the CSM mindset of customer care and the AE mindset of making the sale. To learn more about the traits you should look for in a CSM, check out this article.

Tailoring it for you

Depending on the product you’re selling, the maturity of your organization, and the size of your customers, you may need to switch from one ownership model to another. Through this transition, remember to define the roles clearly to your customers, aligning to their needs. All of this will result in high expansion and successful renewals.

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

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Analyzing Airport Reviews Using Natural Language Processing

We used cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis software to analyze thousands of airport reviews. Here's what we found.

We used cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis software to analyze thousands of airport reviews. By combining qualitative and quantitative data, our analyses reveal what travelers are talking about, how they feel, and why they feel that way. 

Read them all: using NLP to analyze airport reviews

  1. Atlanta International has a big problem with “wayfinding”
  2. Charlotte Douglas can profit big by listening to their customers
  3. Chicago O’Hare needs to learn about viral reputation management
  4. Dallas/Fort Worth has a dirty secret
  5. Denver International may be a secret haven for the Illuminati
  6. New York’s JFK has to plan for the future
  7. Las Vegas McCarran doesn’t shy away from your vices
  8. San Francisco can teach us about listening to customers
  9. Seattle-Tacoma has a vocal customer named Jerry
  10. Los Angeles needs to master the “final mile”
  11. Summary: The Definitive Data-Driven Airport Ranking List

Why are we doing this?

Each year, the Lexalytics, an InMoment company, marketing team sets some time aside for an offsite meet-up. This time, fresh off of some awful layovers and baggage nightmares, we got to talking about airports and the experience of traveling.

Some questions arose:

Which airports should we fly through next time? Where should we avoid?

It didn’t take long to find dozens of listicles, news articles, interest pieces, and blogs. Each one claimed to be the “definitive guide” to American airports. But then we realized that none of them agreed with each other.

Who should we trust? We couldn’t even agree on that.

Clearly, we weren’t going to find a definitive list on American airports by Googling. So, why not make it ourselves?

We already had the perfect data analytics tool at our disposal powered by text analytics and machine learning with intuitive dashboards that helped us quickly cut through the noise to gain rich, interesting insights. 

869,973 words, 30,000 travelers, 10 airports

Of course, our first step was to gather a data set.

In total, we analyzed 869,973 words from Facebook reviews left by more than 30,000 real travelers at America’s top 10 busiest airports. This 10-part blog series details our findings for each airport.

(Shoutout to Gensler, the airport architecture and planning firm, our strategic partner for this project.)

[AtlantaAirportSentimentCloud.png]
Sentiment-colored word cloud generated from Atlanta airport reviews
Remember, these dashboards don’t represent the opinions of journalists or travel bloggers. Instead, they showcase actual insights gleaned from over 30,000 real travelers. 

Real feedback from real people who use these facilities every day, written in their words.

This is data-driven voice of customer in action. The result? Deeper insights and much more nuance than a simple star rating or NPS survey.

What’s more, in this series we take you behind the scenes. We show you the steps involved in analyzing these airport reviews, and how each airport in question can use these insights to create better traveler experiences, reduce costs, and increase revenue.

First insights after analyzing airport reviews

Right off the bat, our new airport review analytics project delivered some very interesting insights.

For example, going into this project we noticed that San Francisco International rarely makes it into airport quality listicles.

But when we analyzed Facebook reviews in Semantria Storage and Visualization, we found that many travelers praise SFO as one of the finest airports in America.

Sentiment surrounding SFO wayfinding trends positive over time

Why does the travel industry ignore San Francisco’s airport when it’s so well-reviewed by customers?

Using industry packs for instant configuration

One more cool side-note before we get started.

At first, every analysis we conducted told us that “security” rated positively. This came as a surprise: getting through security at the airport is not exactly a low-stress endeavor.

But after activating Lexalytics’ airline industry pack configuration, security went from bright green to dark red. That is, the sentiment weight dropped from a net positive to a net negative.

The airline industry pack allows me to see the conversation within the unique context of the airline industry. Enabling this industry configuration was as easy as selecting the expiration date for a credit card. I selected it from a drop-down menu, and that was it. 

Airport series: using NLP to analyze airport reviews

This series goes alphabetically, airport by airport, to unleash the collective voice of America’s airport customers. 

First up in our series is the busiest airport in the world: Atlanta International Airport, which has a big problem with “wayfinding”.

  1. Atlanta International has a big problem with “wayfinding”
  2. Charlotte Douglas can profit big by listening to their customers
  3. Chicago O’Hare needs to learn about viral reputation management
  4. Dallas/Fort Worth has a dirty secret
  5. Denver International may be a secret haven for the Illuminati
  6. New York’s JFK has to plan for the future
  7. Las Vegas McCarran doesn’t shy away from your vices
  8. San Francisco can teach us about listening to customers
  9. Seattle-Tacoma has a vocal customer named Jerry
  10. Los Angeles needs to master the “final mile”
  11. Summary: The Definitive Data-Driven Airport Ranking List

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4 Cornerstones of an Effective VoC Platform

Choosing a VoC platform can be complex. But, every successful VoC platform should come equipped with these four features that will help you effectively collect and analyze Voice of the Customer data.

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) platform is an important step in becoming a customer-obsessed organization. Only 50% of organizations say their voice of customer data is entirely captured to drive innovation opportunities, so doing so already puts you ahead of the competition. 

When evaluating VoC platforms, there will be a lot of different features to choose from across various vendors. But, there are certain must-have features that every effective VoC platform has. 

What is a VoC Platform?

A VoC platform is software that helps you collect, manage, and analyze voice of the customer data. Having all of your customer data in one place makes it easier to uncover insights, share reports and insights with the appropriate stakeholders, and make better-informed decisions to improve your business. 

Why is a VoC Platform Important?

A VoC platform is important because it helps you make better connections with your customers. With a VoC platform, you can see all the different ways customers interact with your business in one place, as opposed to having siloed customer data in different parts of your organization. 

What Are the Benefits of a VoC Platform?

Utilizing a VoC platform can lead to many benefits. The biggest advantage of having a VoC platform is an increase in whatever customer experience metrics you track within your business. Whether you are tracking ease of use or overall customer satisfaction, being able to understand what your customers are saying in different points through the customer journey will help you work to achieve these goals. Not only that – those increases in customer experience metrics can actually lead to an increase in your organization’s bottom line – as in revenue growth and ROI! Check out our handy VoC calculator below to see just how much your business can benefit from utilizing a VoC platform.

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

Estimated Revenue Growth
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI
Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

So what elements should be foundational for an effective VoC platform? Here are four features that should come standard in any software promising to collect and analyze data that improves the customer experience:

Voice of customer technology

Omnichannel Engagement

One of the most important use cases of a VoC platform is to host all of your customer data in one place. Consumers are increasingly wanting to have an omnichannel customer experience with their favorite brands, which means you need a platform that can monitor the different touchpoints they have across different channels. 

Case Management

Case management refers to a system that utilizes intelligent alerts to highlight top-priority customers either to increase customer acquisition or reduce customer churn. 

This is an important feature for VoC platforms to have because it will not only help you quantify the customer experience ROI you are getting from your VoC efforts but also help you improve business operations. 

For example, after having a negative experience at a retail location, a customer might express their displeasure through an online review. However, case management software can detect that this customer is likely to churn and create an alert so that this customer’s issue becomes a top priority for the business. With swift action, the business can resolve the issue and keep the customer. 

Case management software being used to improve a business

Text Analytics

Text analytics is a key feature of VoC platforms because those platforms deal with so much unstructured data. Whether it’s an open question on a post-transactional survey, a social media comment, or an online review, your customers share so much feedback that is hard to measure by traditional standards. 

Text analysis in VoC platforms helps you uncover customer sentiment, which is crucial to understand when making customer experience improvements. Customer sentiment will help you accurately deduce what matters most to your customers.   

Dashboards and Reporting

Effective VoC platforms should be equipped with various customer experience dashboards that you can leverage. The main dashboard in a VoC platform will most likely be a high-level view at the state of your voice of customer efforts, but you should also have the ability to dive deeper into certain metrics. 

With the different dashboards you use, it is also important to choose a VoC platform that makes easily accessible and shareable reports. Reports such as these are important to champion your VoC efforts and show the impact they are making on your business. 

Other Features to Look for in a VoC Platform

The four cornerstones of a VoC platform represent the table stakes for being able to run a viable voice of the customer program. However, other features will take your program to the next level and help you seamlessly improve the customer experience. 

Review Management

Being able to track and respond to online reviews can be a frustrating process if done manually. With so many platforms such as Google, Bing, Yelp, Glassdoor, etc, going to each of those individual platforms to see what customers are saying and responding to them can be extremely time-consuming. 

Review management is one of the most important features in exceptional VoC platforms because it gives you the ability to track every review, on every platform, all in one place while also being able to respond to reviews within the VoC platform itself. This is not only a time-saving process but also makes it much easier to analyze unstructured feedback.  

Social Media Monitoring 

In today’s business environment, the importance of social media marketing cannot be overstated. 68% of consumers use social media to stay informed about new products or services. Your customers also want to interact with you via social media with 59% of customers expecting a social response within two business days. 

Social media monitoring helps you track all of the ways customers interact with your social media posts. You can monitor likes, shares, comments, and more. Regardless of the industry you are in, social media is one of the best ways to connect with your customers which makes social media monitoring a key tool for VoC platforms. 

Call Center Recordings

Call recordings are some of the most underutilized pieces of customer feedback, simply because it is too time-consuming to listen back to recordings and extract insights from them. However, with conversation intelligence, you can easily get actionable insights from customer conversations. This can be useful to implement into your customer experience improvement efforts, and can also be used to train employees on common issues. 

Choose InMoment for Your VoC Platform

By arming yourself with tools that allow for omnichannel engagement, case management, text analytics, and dashboards and reporting, and more, you are setting your organization up for the best voice of customer understanding possible.

If you are interested in seeing how much ROI InMoment can deliver for you with voice of the customer surveys, check out our ROI calculator!

If you want to learn more about InMoment’s VoC platform and how it can be customized to fit the needs of your organization, schedule a demo today!

References 

Statista. Organizations that capture the voice of customer (VoC) to drive innovation opportunities in the United States as of 2021. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196769/organizations-using-voc-programs-to-improve-cx-in-the-us/). Accessed 9/6/2024. 

Sprout Social. The Sprout Social Index Report 2023. (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/index/). Accessed 9/6/2024.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

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

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.

CES: New Ways SaaS Companies are Using Customer Effort Score

Effort. We’re taught to praise it, get really good at avoiding it, and really, would rather do without it. Effort is hard and uncomfortable. As human beings, we’ve designed incredible digital tools to reduce effort as much as possible. Today, “user-friendly” isn’t just a selling point anymore, it’s become a basic expectation among customers – to the point that if a task isn’t intuitively easy to complete, consumers will drop the product and go elsewhere.

Effort is a big deal.

So why are most companies not measuring customer effort, or only relegating it to a customer support metric?

What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a newer metric originally developed for Customer Support. In that context, it measures customer service satisfaction by asking customers “How easy was it to get the help you wanted today?” That is valuable information for your Support department. But Customer Success and Product Development departments have been latching onto the idea for so much more.

The core CES question is: “How much effort did this task require to complete?” – typically on a scale of 1-7. And that question, followed by an open-ended “Care to tell us why?” question,  can be used in a number of ways to yield more relevant feedback from customers on numerous fronts.

In-app CES Customer Effort Score Survey

Customer Success and Product Development teams in particular have been adding CES to their customer journey metrics to get feedback on onboarding and ease of feature use.

[ctt template=”3″ link=”1b54y” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”]”Anytime you have a workflow you want a customer to complete, #CES is a great question to ask.” – Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer, Wootric[/ctt]

How Product teams use CES to improve UX & feature adoption

Customer Effort Score fits in seamlessly with Product goals because user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) depend largely on ease of use. Product teams are starting to use CES to get feedback on how well the UI supports new feature adoption and to identify moments where customers begin to feel frustrated and lost.

Frustration is an emotion that is closely linked not only to churn, but to a decreased rate of customer advocacy.

“The revenue impact from a 10% improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion.” – Forrester

“Frustration metrics” like rage clicks, error clicks and form abandonment are also useful to track, and can alert dev teams to issues they may not have expected, but adding CES to the mix can shed more light into just how hard customers perceive tasks to be. And with an open-ended follow-up question, they can even tell you why. When 40 to 60 percent of software users open an app once – and never log in again – anything that reduces friction during those early critical stages will have major impact.

Canva, a design tool for non-designers with a freemium sales model, has one of the smoothest onboarding sequences, which begins with a 2-minute tutorial that shows users the value they’re about to get while giving hands-on instruction on using the tool. Instructions ask users to complete fun design exercises, like putting a hat on a monkey or selecting different layouts and backgrounds, which builds users’ confidence.

Canva onboarding

Canva onboarding example 2

SaaS guru Lincoln Murphy says, “The first in-app experience your customer has with your product sets the tone for your relationship, and if it’s confusing, overwhelming, or otherwise puts up barriers to achieving success (or at least recognizing the value potential of your product, you’re in trouble.”

Canva may hit this out of the park, but for businesses struggling with smoothing out their onboarding flow, CES surveys – especially those that can be deployed while the users are in the app – becomes tremendously valuable.

But it’s not just about reducing friction and frustration – retention really is about ease. A Customer Contact Council survey of more than 75,000 consumers found that the most important factor in customer loyalty was reducing effort – defined as “the work they must do to get their problem solved.”

How Customer Success teams use CES to reduce churn

Customer Success managers know that one of the most important purposes of onboarding is getting the customer to experience value from the product – as soon as possible. This has it’s own metric, called “time to first value,” and the shorter it is, the more likely the customer will be to continue using the product.

CES for onboarding

CES now helps Customer Success keep a pulse on the onboarding experience of each new customer. The customer onboarding experience in Enterprise SaaS can involve training and implementation advice delivered by Customer Success Managers, in addition to the elements like videos, documentation and walk-throughs in the product itself. Unfortunately, “the seeds of churn” are sown if that process is painful.

Sarang Bhatt, Customer Success Manager at Wootric uses Wootric’s own CES survey to assess the onboarding process. “I find it very useful. We may not get a 7 every single time, but when we do miss the mark, we can close the loop with the customer and improve our processes for the next cycle. This is all because we have proactively solicited honest feedback via CES. Customers see a CES survey before NPS, so it gives us a chance to learn whether we are on track and make adjustments.” 

CES for monitoring customer hand off from Sales to Success

Customer Success teams are also using CES even earlier in the customer journey to measure the ease of transition between Sales and CSMs.

One of the most common causes of frustration for customers is answering questions asked by Sales, only to have to repeat their answers once they’re handed to a Customer Success Manager. The interdepartmental communication ball tends to be dropped during the handoff because customer information is siloed by department instead of shared freely. Customer Effort Score serves as an alert when these types of communication failures affect UX

In fact, Customer Success can use CES to monitor many (if not every) success milestone to see how easily customers achieved them – from the customers’ perspectives. Mapping CES onto the customer’s journey by checking in at success milestones effectively transforms CES into part of the overall customer health score every CSM should be tracking.

Not familiar with customer success milestones? These are often a checklist of tasks your customers must complete to use your product successfully and get closer to achieving their ideal outcomes – what they really want from your product. You can chart them out visually in a customer journey map.

CES for Advocacy

Using CES in customer success has another benefit: advocacy. Users are more inclined to become brand advocates – sharing positive reviews publicly – after positive support experiences. So an in-app CES question that follows high ratings with a timely advocacy ask can help spread brand awareness.

How Customer Service & Support use CES

CES surveys are most often deployed via email after customer support interactions. A user has a question, contacts customer support, receives an answer, and is then asked to score the interaction based on ease.

Why ease? Because research shows that the most important attribute of satisfaction is ease, which makes it the most logical metric to use instead of, or in addition to, other satisfaction metrics like length of wait time or even resolution of the problem. The CES question gets straight to the heart of whether the customer service experience increased satisfaction.

Don’t throw CSAT away though – customer satisfaction metrics provide broader feedback that is still extremely useful.

What to do if CES is low

What if the rating isn’t high? Close the loop! Put a process in place, or use a software platform like Wootric, that takes less than ideal customer effort scores and allows you to close the loop with the customer by reaching out to them individually or triggering appropriate automated responses.  Take action — create a cross-functional team to review feedback and prioritize actions you can take that will ease the pain and create a better experience for your customers.

Trends Tab CES in Wootric Dashboard
CES Trend in Wootric Analytics Dashboard

As you track CES over time, you’ll be able to see the results of your efforts in the score and in your customer retention numbers as well!

Sign up today for free Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

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