Page 47 – InMoment

3 Reasons You Should Create a CX Roadmap

Implementing a customer experience strategy can impact your business almost instantly, but the true benefit lies in the long-term results.

With CX, measuring short-term post-transactional surveys only shows you a glimpse into “how we are doing now.” While there is value in measuring these short-term, point-in-time surveys, they’re only giving you just that—a snapshot into the customer’s experience.

Instead, we want to look at the benefits of a long-term CX roadmap and how it allows you to broaden the scope and look beyond single interactions, giving you a more in-depth look at your customer’s experience.

Here are three reasons you should implement a long-term CX roadmap:

1. It will help you measure and track the ROI of your CX program.

Proving ROI, for some companies, can be one of the most difficult aspects of their CX strategy. Business leaders expect results, and they want to know if their investment in CX is paying off.

In order to track the ROI on your CX program, you’ll need to first set a benchmark. Having a Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) benchmark, for instance, will help you tie efforts to revenue.

This fundamental piece of your roadmap will help you create goals that are easy to track and achieve. Knowing where you fall now will help you gauge where you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, and even years from now.

2. You can visualize and implement quick wins and long-term fixes.

Improving your CX doesn’t happen overnight. Some improvements can be implemented quickly, while others may require changes that impact the business as a whole and take months, or even years to roll out.

Creating a roadmap that strategizes how to attack the long-term issues in the future gives you a guide for improving experiences and touchpoints that take more buy off or time to implement than some of the quicker, easier fixes. Having a list of quick wins and a roadmap gives everyone visibility into how your organization is prioritizing putting the customer first. It shows that as a business you’re listening to the feedback from not only the customer, but the employees that interact and shape the experience with your brand.

3. You will stay ahead of the always-changing landscape.

Your commitment to provide an excellent customer experience may not change, but your customers and the landscape they live in always will. New products, technologies, competitors, and increasing customer expectations mean that your strategy must be constantly evolving and improving. What is relevant today isn’t necessarily going to be relevant tomorrow.

As mentioned in Forrester’s recent report, “How to Build the Right CX Strategy,” there are both obvious reasons and more subtle cues that signal it’s time to revisit your CX strategy. When creating your long-term plan, it’s important to be flexible. Plan for the future but prepare for the unexpected. Allow your long-term CX roadmap to flex and grow with your business and customers. Make changes and improvements as you go by measuring, tracking, and predicting what your customers expect.

Transitioning from a short-term outlook to a long-term roadmap will help you better understand your customers and how they interact with your brand beyond a single transaction.

At InMoment, our CX Architects are here to help you visualize and build a CX roadmap that will help you create longer customer life cycles and more repeat customers.

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Updated July 31, 2024

Reading time 2 minutes

The Importance of Aligning Promise and Expectation

Customers expect consistency. If these expectations aren’t met, a hostile relationship can occur between a customer and brand. Meeting expectations consistently, across all platforms and channels is, therefore, key to driving trust and loyalty with customers.

Understanding Expectations

InMoment’s 2017 CX Trends Report highlights that brand and customer perceptions are beginning to align more closely in some areas, such as personalisation and feedback responses. However, it also reveals some significant disconnects. One such disconnect is that brands do not fully understand customer expectations, or the positive and negative emotions that can arise from meeting, or breaking, those expectations.

Our Trends Report shows that satisfaction tops the list of emotions customers associate with brands with which they feel most loyal. At the end of the day, customers aren’t asking for much – they want the brand’s promise to be delivered and, most importantly, they want to be satisfied.

Alignment

A company may have multiple platforms of communication with its customers. On a daily basis customers may interact with a company through different media channels, different devices and even through visiting brick and mortar locations. Whilst these channels are all different, customers conceive a company as a single entity. If they have a bad experience with one channel, this could impact their experience with the wider business. No matter how many channels a company has to communicate with its customers, if there is no alignment between these channels, the overall experience is diminished.

Before brands divert resources in an attempt to delight customers, they must master alignment of both promises and expectation. The key is in knowing what customers want from each brand touchpoint, using CX data, and ensuring the brand promise is being delivered accordingly.

In addition, with many companies looking to use customer experience as an important differentiator, getting every employee on the same page should be a top priority. Employee alignment is key in order for this to happen. Brands need to foster an environment where all employees are focussed on helping customers succeed if they are to create a consistent experience regardless of product, location, channel or platform.

Building trust with your customers

The ultimate goal of most companies is to build trust with customers (as trust can lead to loyalty). Trust, however, doesn’t just happen – it must be earned through a series of good experiences, over time.

Understanding customer expectations is just the starting point for most companies. Aligning the brand promise and messaging comes next. Then, and only then, can a company start to build customer trust.

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Written by James Bolle

Reading time 2 minutes

How to Start a Customer Success Program from Scratch

If your SaaS company hasn’t leapt on board the Customer Success train yet, it’s likely due to “focusing on other things,” or “we don’t have the budget for that right now.” But prioritizing a customer success program pays big dividends in returning revenue – so much so that it’s gaining the reputation as the ultimate growth hack. That’s not hype – Customer Success is how SaaS businesses raise retention rates and increase referrals while paving the road for cross-sells and upsells.

Why Should You Establish a Customer Success Program?

If you’re focusing most of your resources on acquisition, you’re missing out on one of the greatest growth engines at your disposal.

“Customer success is where 90% of the revenue is,” – Jason Lemkin, venture capitalist and founder of SaaStr

Customer Retention

Acquisition may get the ball rolling, but retention is where the big money is. Big, sustainable money that costs less and less to make. And, this alchemy only works when customers achieve the successes with the product or service that they’d hoped for upon signing up. Customer success programs are large factors in reducing churn and helping increase long-term customer retention.

Expands Business

Statistically, successful customers:

Spend more money over time
Are highly likely to consider additional products and services
Serve as enthusiastic brand advocates that reduce the Cost to Acquire new customers (CAC)

Easier Future Acquisition

That last point, customer evangelism (aka. brand advocacy), is the most significant benefit of Customer Success and the one that leads to spending less on acquisition efforts, while acquiring more customers.

When your company understands what success means to your customers, then ensures they receive what they need to achieve it, those customers respond – on Facebook, on Twitter, on Yelp, on Linkedin, and in person. They become not just your fans, but your best salespeople, helping your company grow.

But how do you start a customer success program from scratch?

First, let’s start with what customer success really is, because any time a term becomes a “buzzword” it tends to lose its original meaning.

What Is Customer Success?

Customer Success is how you help customers achieve their desired outcomes, even if those outcomes are outside of the product or service you provide.

With this as our definition, Customer Success is really about one thing: Giving your customers everything they need to be successful with your product – within and outside of the product.

For example, if a person downloads a SaaS budgeting app, they don’t want to budget per se, but they do want to pay off their credit card debt and start saving for a kitchen remodel. That is what success means. Not using the app. Not budgeting. But finally running your hands over smooth quartz countertops and showing off that Big Chill refrigerator when the neighbors come over.

That is success. Your product or service is merely the means to get there.

Sure, you can pile more tasks onto your Customer Success department, like planning upsells and cross-sells and customer referral rewards programs. But if you don’t have that one thing in place first – their success – you can’t move onto anything else.

It’s why I advocate building Success Milestones into Product Development’s user flows.

What Are Success Milestones?

Success Milestones are when customers receive value – value that they recognize – from using a product. It’s when that budgeting app customer saves their first thousand towards that Big Chill ‘fridge.

Building Success Milestones into your user flow is a useful way to chart what’s happening within the app and link it to wins happening in real life.

For businesses looking to build a Customer Success program from scratch, this is a key concept. Your process begins by understanding your ideal customer’s real life.

You need to understand how your product fits into their lives, helps them achieve their real-life goals, what frustrates them, and what blocks them from achieving those goals.

Which leads us to Step 1.

How to Start a Customer Success Program

Step 1. Get to know your ideal customer really well (through qualitative data)

When your company was merely a gleam in your founder’s eye, there was (hopefully) a process in place to identify ideal customers and find out what problems they needed to solve, which pain points felt the worst, and what they deeply wanted to achieve.

If your founder followed the Lean Startup methodology, customer interviews happened to ensure product-market/problem-solution fit well before Product Development set to work.

But, if your company skipped those steps, you’ve got a lot of qualitative data to catch up on.

Do not panic. You don’t have to start at the beginning, because you have a product and customers already. What you need to do now is focus on the segment of customers who fit into your ideal customer profile.

Your ideal customers are: Customers who love your product, use it, and tell other people about it because they love it so much.

You can identify which of your existing customers fall into this category by tracking brand mentions, but you can also just ask.

When it comes to identifying your best customers, a Net Promoter Score survey is fast and efficient. You can send the survey via email or within your app (a less disruptive option), and ask existing customers “On a scale of 1 through 10, with 10 being most likely, how likely are you to recommend this product to friends and colleagues?”

Anyone who scores a 9 or 10 is a “Promoter.”

Promoters are the people we want to speak with when developing Customer Success Program strategies because we know, for certain, that they have problem/solution fit. Not all customers do. Customer Success can only do so much, and if there isn’t that problem/solution fit from the start, you can’t manufacture it. So you have to identify it, attract more of it, and nurture it.

Customer Success is as much about identifying customers likely to be a good fit as it is helping them achieve their ideal outcomes.

Ask some of your Promoters – those who scored 9s and 10s – if they’d be willing to speak with you, or at least fill out a detailed open-ended-question survey, so you can confidently identify your ideal customer’s needs, wants, pain points, ideal outcomes and more. This qualitative data will allow you to create solutions that speak uniquely to them.

Sarah E. Brown, Head of Customer, Community and Brand Marketing at ServiceRocket, uses a Voice of Customer program with NPS to understand how well they’re delivering outcomes for customers and improve marketing at the same time:

“VOC is executed through our marketing function in conjunction with our Customer Success team, and together we are able to identify high NPS customers as brand advocates and follow up with them to create high-value marketing collateral like co-hosted webinars, case studies, podcasts and video testimonials.

Through our NPS review program, we have an incredibly clear picture into our customers who are using our product to achieve successful outcomes. Then we channel them into becoming vocal advocates who bring in new customers and help current customers love our software even more.”

Step 2. Build Your Team

Once you understand who you’re serving and what they’re trying to achieve, you need to put your team together. Sure, you could hire an experienced Customer Success manager or consultant, but you can also look inside your own building – at the Sales department.

A good salesperson already knows your product and your customers, which makes for a relatively easy transition. The key, however, is to shift the sales mindset from selling the product to setting up customers for success.

That can be a substantial challenge. Because sometimes, a customer’s success won’t come from being upsold, and it can run counter to the salesperson’s gut instincts to not jump at an immediate sale, and say “Hey, your company is on the smaller side. I don’t think you need this additional service yet. So let’s focus on how we can help you grow to the point where this service would be really useful.”

Customer Success can, sometimes, mean delayed gratification. But the loyalty you build by giving advice that is 100% to the customer’s benefit is priceless.

When assembling your Customer Success team, there are a couple more very important characteristics to watch out for: You’ll need people who are good team players and great communicators, because the most effective Customer Success teams are those that work closely with Sales, Service and Product to find ways to bridge success gaps.

Step 3. Determine What Structure You Need to Help Customers Reach Their Ideal Outcomes

If you have the resources, investing in a full-service Customer Success platform, like Gainsight, is a great way to begin. But these solutions can be out of reach, budget-wise. If that’s the case, then you may have to DIY and create your own processes.

Things you’ll need to consider:

Customer segments – do you have one “ideal customer” or an “ideal customer” for each user segment?
Do your user segments require different levels of help to reach their ideal outcomes? Often, one segment of users needs a higher-touch approach than another segment (and no, you shouldn’t base higher-touch vs. lower-touch solely on how much the segment pays – a lower paying segment might have high-paying potential with the right nudge).
What are the desired outcomes for each segment? Do they require different resources to reach them?
How do you intend to track customer health? What can you identify as “red flags” of disengagement?
Do you have a way to mark different customers according to their life stage – and whether/when they are reaching their Success Milestones?
If you have an existing product and the ability to track user behavior within it, where do users drop off?
Is there a process in place to identify when certain Success Milestones are reached and present opportunities for logical upsells?
Where are success gaps happening for each segment? (A success gap is the space between what your product does and the user achieving his or her desired outcome).

Step 4. Must-Have Metrics

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is the foundation for a strategy to increase ROI and sustain growth, but its shortest definition is: The revenue earned from a single customer over time. LTV includes Cost to Acquire a new Customer (CAC) and Churn rate – how quickly customers leave. However, most calculations fail to include cross-sells, up-sells, and the value of referrals for each customer, which increase LTV. To affect LTV, your marketing strategies should take these other factors into account as well. LTV is, perhaps, the most important metric CSMs in subscription-based businesses can track because it’s the best at predicting success… or failure. Cost to Acquire (CAC) is intimately connected with LTV because if your CAC is higher than or equal to your LTV, your business is FAILING! The Cost to Acquire number comes from tracking metrics like manufacturing costs, research, development, and marketing – everything you need to convince a potential customer to buy. While the equation is simple enough – just divide the total costs of acquisition by total new customers within a specified time period – adding up every acquisition-related activity is where companies get bogged down.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) works better than churn to score how well you’re doing at delivering desired outcomes. Sometimes, an unhappy customer won’t get around to churning – the effort is just too low on their to-do list. But if you ask that customer if they’d recommend you to a friend (the NPS question is “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”), you’ll get an honest answer. Many NPS platforms also allow you to segment your surveys for even deeper insights. This is a great number to use if you haven’t got time to creat a complex customer health score system.
Churn is important to track, but more so in the context of understanding what causes churn and how you can proactively prevent churn. Yes, you need to know how many people are leaving. But that number is too little, too late. What you really need to track are the leading indicators of churn.
Customer Effort Score – Traditionally used by support teams, CES can also be used to get feedback on user experience in onboarding, new feature setup, and to identify obstacles to users finding value.

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.

There are others. Groove reduced churn by 71% by using what they called “red flag” metrics, including:

Length of first session
Frequency of logins
Total number of logins
Time spent on individual tasks (the longer the time spent, the more trouble the user is probably having, and the more likely they are to churn)

Whatever metrics you track, essentially, you need to know how well your customers are doing at any given time, identify when they’re experiencing success, be alerted when they run into trouble, and have a plan in place for helping them to grow and succeed even more (by using more of your product when it can benefit them).

It’s helpful to plan all of this within the context of the Product department’s user flows, which brings us to…

Step 5. Collaborate

Customer Success can’t do its best work separated off from other departments, keeping its data in a silo. It won’t do you any good to collect all of this data on your customers if you can’t share what you learn with departments able to act on that information.

To really begin to see the results of your Customer Success program, you’ll need to open lines of communication with Sales, Customer Service and Product Development so you can work together to identify and bridge success gaps for customers. Better yet, invite one person from each department to be part of the Customer Success team.

One example of effective collaboration is between Product and Customer Success. Customer Success needs Product Development to address product-specific success gap issues, and Product Dev needs to understand the broader concept of ideal outcomes, and where success gaps are occurring, from Customer Success. A good place to start collaborating is to align behind customer feedback. Use that to start discussions and to lay the foundation for the solutions you can find together.

When you bring these two departments together, you can achieve all of that and more, like building in Success Milestones into the app itself so users can track their own successes (and sales teams can keep tabs on their progress and introduce upsell suggestions when they make sense).

Step 6. Focus on One Thing at a Time

Is it retention after onboarding? Identifying upsell opportunities? Filling success gaps? Once your customer success program is set up, it can be hard to figure out what to focus on next. Kayla Murphy, Customer Growth, Advocacy and Success at Trustfuel works with early-stage Customer Success teams and recommends focusing on one thing at a time.

“Start with one focus and build processes to go with it. Institute QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) or regular check-ins. Start tracking your usage data and figuring out which metrics give you the best picture of customer health.

Just start.

Many of the teams I work with felt a great deal of analysis paralysis at the beginning of their customer success journey. They were worried about annoying customers, tracking the wrong metrics, or focusing so much on unhealthy accounts that morale dies. You have to start somewhere and no one knows more about your customers right now than you. Start being proactive and consistently evaluate your processes.”

Just start, perhaps, is the best advice.

How it All Works Together

Let’s pretend that customer acquisition is a game of “Who can prove their worth the fastest?”

The players are you and your competitors.

When a new user signs up to try your product, it triggers a series of events – the goal of which is proving your worth before that user gets bored and signs up with your competition.

When a new user signs up…

– The new user receives a welcome email from a Customer Success agent who asks them what they would most like to achieve with your product.

– The new user is impressed that somebody cares (they care! They really care!) and replies: “I’d like to sell more balloon poodles at the next county fair.”

– The Customer Success agent replies “I love balloon poodles! So cool! Would 50 more balloon poodles be a realistic starting goal for the next 3 months?”

See what happened there? The customer success agent keys in on the new customer’s desired outcome, then creates a specific, measurable, attainable goal that they can keep track of. Maybe there’s even a page built into the website that helps the customer track their own progress towards their goal.

These steps don’t need to happen over email (although this is exactly what Slack does during onboarding). They can happen within your product too. Or a combination, like using a simple in-app how-to program to guide newbies through their first several actions. Then you might use customer feedback on their desired outcomes to send them an appropriate ebook or link to relevant blog posts to help them achieve it.

Essentially, you prove your worth by making your customer’s success a priority – and making sure they know it!

Build an effective customer success program with InMoment today.

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

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

Updated July 24, 2024

Reading time 14 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

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

Improving Survey Response Rates Through Incentives

From time to time customer experience managers will hear the following questions from their internal clients: “Is our response rate too low?”; “What can we do to increase our response rate?” or; “Should we provide an incentive for people to respond?” Like many things in research, these relatively simple questions have somewhat complex answers.

When faced with these questions, the first thing to address is what issue is really being raised. Is the question really about increasing response rates (the percentage of people who respond to a survey invitation), or is it about increasing the total number of responses at a given level of the organization (e.g., dealerships) or is it about improving the representativeness of the responses obtained? Improving the response rate is often not the most effective way to increase the total number of responses and/or improve representativeness.

Increasing the Number of Responses and Improving Representativeness

To increase responses at the unit level and improve representativeness, the first place to look is the sampling scheme. Is the program sampling only a small percentage of customers in an attempt to control costs? If so, it is often more economically feasible to sample more customers and not use an incentive than it is to provide an incentive to increase response rates of a smaller sample.

Another aspect of the sampling scheme to examine is whether important segments of customers are being excluded from  the sample frame. For instance, in the automotive industry it has typically been the practice that customer-pay (as opposed to warranty) customers are excluded from dealership service experience surveys, even though most dealerships do much more customer-pay service work than they do warranty work. This practice started because of difficulties getting access to customer-pay records. Now that mechanisms are in place for most manufacturers to obtain customer-pay records, these customers should be included in the sampling frame.

Obviously, inclusion of these customers will increase representativeness of the returns because an important part of the dealership’s business will now be included in the responses.

Improving Response Rates

If the question is indeed about improving the response rate or if improving the response rate is likely to be the best way to improve representativeness and/or the number of responses, providing an incentive to customers to respond is often not the most effective tactic to use. The choice of whether to respond to a survey invitation is a cost-benefit decision for the customer. How much will completing the survey cost the customer versus what benefit will he/she receive? At  first glance, one might think that there is no cost to the customer to respond. However, there are many costs and these costs have been increasing over the past few decades. These include:

Time–People are now more pressed for time than in years past and they are more often solicited for research than previously.
Effort–Many surveys are long and complicated.
Hassle/Boredom–Some customers feel “duped” by agreeing to take what they think is a short survey and then finding out it is quite long; many surveys contain boring and repetitive questions.
Potential for Loss of Privacy–Many customers worry that their information will not be kept confidential.
Potential of Being Put on Numerous Mail/E-mail/Phone Lists–Many customers are concerned that their contact information will be sold to other companies and used for marketing purposes.
Potential for Being Subjected to a Sales Pitch–With the increase in Selling Under the Guise of Research (“Sugging”) customers are more skeptical about the legitimacy of survey invitations.

On the benefits side of the equation, in years past customers often felt special and valued because they were being asked for their opinions. Unfortunately, as survey research has proliferated, being asked for your opinion is no longer a unique experience that conveys “specialness.” Customers also seemed more motivated to contribute to the “greater good” by providing feedback about products and services than they are today. Some argue that the younger generations are less interested in the greater good and have even labeled Generation Y the “What’s in It for Me?” generation. Also, those interested in providing feedback now have many ways of doing so (e.g., blogging, posting comments at customer-generated media sites, etc.) instead of completing a survey.

Look at Both Sides of the Customer Cost/Benefit Equation

To increase response rates, researchers should look at both sides of the customer cost/benefit equation by seeking to decrease the cost to the customer and increase the benefits of participation. Some suggestions for reducing the customers’ costs are:

Coordinate customer touch points. Many companies inadvertently over survey their customers because different departments or divisions conduct independent research programs.
Make the task as easy as possible.
Make the survey as short as possible, but not shorter than   Sometimes customers can interpret a very short survey as the company not really being interested in their opinions and just “going through the motions” of gathering customer feedback.
Make the survey as interactive and entertaining as possible, while maintaining collection of valid information.
Give customers the opportunity to choose how and when to respond.
Give customers the ability to “tell their story” rather than only answering a large number of specific closed-ended questions. Then use text analytics to gather insights from the customers’ comments.
Be very specific about how the information will and will not be used.
Avoid “nice to know” questions that are often included “because we have them responding anyway.”
Avoid sensitive questions (e.g., income, sexual orientation) unless they are really necessary. If they must be asked, explain to the customer why you are asking the questions and what will be done with the information.

Ways of increasing the benefits of participation to the customer are:

Send customers a “thank you” and briefly explain how the information is used.
Show customers how the information is being used. For example, some companies have posted signs in their retail outlets telling customers what improvement efforts are being made due to customer feedback.
Assure customers they will get a personal follow-up if they request it and they will not get a follow-up if they don’t request it. It is very important that companies follow-up on these promises. Otherwise, it will cause dissatisfied customers to become even more upset.
Consider allowing customers to see other customers’ feedback. People are social beings and they often want to know if their experience was typical or atypical.
Provide an appropriate reward with monetary value to respond.

Considerations When Using Monetary Incentives

In most circumstances, to increase response rates we recommend investigating the non-monetary methods listed above before considering use of a monetary incentive (or any incentive with monetary value – e.g., a free oil change or a discount coupon for your next purchase). If not done properly, monetary incentives have the potential to bias the responses. This brings us to the issue of what makes an incentive appropriate.

Generally, the smaller the incentive the better. This is not only because smaller incentives are more economical;  it is primarily because larger incentives have more potential to bias results. There are two main concerns with large incentives. First, as incentives increase respondents are more likely to complete the survey just to get the incentive. Therefore, they may pay little or no attention to the questions they are answering and provide bad information. Unfortunately, bad information is worse than no information at all. Second, larger incentives may bias the sample by encouraging lower income individuals to respond at greater rates than higher income individuals. One thing to take into consideration when using a small monetary incentive is that it should be framed as “a small token of our appreciation” to the customer. If customers believe you are trying to compensate them for their time with a small incentive, they can become offended.

If possible, provide the incentive to everyone being sampled rather than promising an incentive to those who complete the survey. In the case of cash incentives to complete a mail survey, most research has shown that inclusion of a small amount (e.g., $1) is more effective at increasing response rates than promising a larger amount (e.g., $5) upon return of the survey. There are many potential reasons for this, but probably the largest is customers’ skepticism that they will receive the promised reward.
The incentive should be something of equal value to everyone, regardless of their experience. Incentives such as discount coupons for the next purchase or the promise of a free oil change have two major problems associated with them. First, they are more valuable to people who intend to return to the retailer (e.g., those that previously had a good experience) than those that are unlikely to return. Therefore, they can bias the results. Second, they can be seen by customers as “just another marketing ploy.”
The incentive must match the methodology and the geography. Inclusion of a dollar bill with mail surveys is relatively easy in the U.S. but it is obviously difficult to do for online or phone surveys. It is also difficult to include money in Canadian mail surveys because the one and two dollar currencies are coins and the added weight of including them increases postal rates.

A Quick Look at Some Common Incentives

Inclusion of a Dollar Bill with a Mail Survey. Surprisingly, when using monetary incentives, this is still one of the most effective ways to increase response rates for mail surveys. This technique is particularly appropriate for small survey programs but can become financially infeasible for large programs.

Entry into a Lottery to Win a Large Prize upon Return of the Survey. For mail surveys, this technique is generally not as effective at increasing response rates as including a dollar bill with the outgoing survey. However, for large programs it is often more economically feasible than using a one-dollar incentive. For smaller programs it is less economically feasible. The use of a lottery is also easier to implement with online and telephone surveys. There are numerous laws and regulations concerning the use of lotteries as an incentive, and it is strongly recommended that a professional promotions management company be employed to manage the lottery.

Providing Discount Coupons. As discussed above, this is generally discouraged because of the potential to bias results and be seen as a marketing effort.

Contributing to Charity in the Customer’s Name.  In general, this technique is not as effective at increasing response rates as either the dollar bill or lottery alternatives. If considering this alternative, it is important to include a number of relatively different charities the customer can choose from. Otherwise, the potential to bias the sample will increase because those in favor of the charity’s cause might respond at higher rates.

Conclusion

Inclusion of a monetary incentive for customers to return experience surveys is not a decision that should be made lightly. It is fraught with potential problems. In general, non-monetary ways of improving representativeness, the number of surveys returned, and response rates should be explored before considering incentives with monetary value. When considering monetary incentives, it is important to match the incentive to the size, methodology, and geography of the program. Conducting a pilot test assessing the costs (both financial costs and results bias) and benefit (in terms of increased response rates) of several different types of monetary incentives are recommended.

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Reading time 9 minutes

3 Keys to Getting the Most Out of Your Restaurant Guest Feedback

A cloud of discouraging news has hung over the restaurant industry for several months now. NPD Group reported the number of restaurants in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest level in 10 years. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, one third of U.S. adults indicated they are eating out less than they did just three months ago.

With fewer diners and the unpleasant news, brands are fighting for every dollar from the guest. A good place to start is elevating the guest experience. As the analyst firm Gartner declared: The customer or guest experience is “the new competitive battlefield.”

To help you navigate through this increasingly tricky battlefield, here are three keys to help you get the most out of your guest feedback and elevate the guest experience so you can win your unfair share of the market.

1. Focus on Stories, Not Scores

During a recent business trip, I had to miss my son’s first little league baseball game of the season. When I called home later that day, I asked him how he did. He proceeded to tell me he got a hit on the very first pitch of his at-bat and knocked the ball right back up the middle of the infield to get a single, and then his teammates managed to bring him home to score with a series of hits. His story was verified with the video my wife captured on her phone.

My son didn’t just recite his personal box score—2/3, 1R—when I asked how he did. He told me the story of the game, along with lots of detail about each at-bat. A box score wouldn’t have given me anywhere near the detail I needed to understand how the game had gone. It’s human nature to tell a story, rather than list off a series of numbers.

Your guests, like my son, have a story to tell—not just a series of ratings to share. Harnessing technology, you can capture rich data about your guests’ experiences. They’ll provide a “box score” by rating different aspects of the experience, from food quality, to staff friendliness, to overall satisfaction.

But the real value comes from the stories they’ll tell. A guest may rate the Quality of the Food a “3” but that doesn’t tell you much. You can infer the food wasn’t excellent or as good as the guest was expecting, but really not much beyond that.

Using artificial intelligence, today’s best feedback technologies can encourage guests to have a real-time conversation with brands—asking them to leave more detail to key into specific topics they mention. This gives the guest who rated the quality of the food a “3” the opportunity to tell you why. Understanding the why behind the score gives you and your staff specific direction on exactly where to focus improvements, as well as what guests love most about your brand.

We like to think of scores kind of like a compass or speedometer—pointing you in a general direction—with stories serving as more of a guidance system. You really need both to understand exactly where you are with your guests, whether you’re heading the right direction, and exactly where to go next.

2. Retain and Recover Guests

Earlier in my career, I worked as the general manager of a local barbecue restaurant. One Friday evening, I heard the words every GM dreads: “The phone’s for you. This guy is really mad.”

I picked up the phone and the conversation went something like this:

“You idiots forgot my barbecue sauce, I have two racks of ribs and no barbecue sauce! I don’t want to eat them without the sauce.”

“I’m really sorry, that shouldn’t have happened. There’s nothing worse than getting home and not having everything you need for you meal. We’d like to make this right. Can I bring you some sauce right now?”

“You would do that? We’re way out here, it’s probably too far.”

“Nope, we really want to make this right for you. Give me your address and I’ll get there as fast as I can.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m a pretty fast driver…”

The guest then gave me his address and I drove like lightning to get to his house. By the time I got there, he met me out on the front porch with a wad of cash for a tip and a smile on his face and thanked me for saving his night. In those few minutes between his call and my delivery, our restaurant had gone from the “idiots who forgot the sauce,” to the “restaurant that was willing to drive to his house.” And he wanted to give us more money, even though we messed up.

In nearly 14 years of working with customer feedback, we see this same trend across every industry we serve. If a brand responds quickly to a problem, resolving it with a high level of satisfaction, the customer is just as likely to return, and just as likely to promote the brand as if they had experienced no problem at all.

New York Times bestselling author Jay Baer has written a book about the importance of connecting with guests who had a bad experience called “Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers.” Baer says that one-third of all customer complaints go completely unanswered which is the worst possible thing you can do. He says, “No reply is actually a reply—it says we don’t care about you at all.”

Through a proper guest recovery process, you can actually turn these negative experiences into a positive result. Reaching out to guests and resolving their concern to their satisfaction is a great retention tool to actually drive business results.

And the effort pays off. Baer writes that, “a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your profits by 25% to 85%… Keeping a guest long term is much more cost effective than trying to find new guests.”

Reaching out does more than recover a single transaction. The value of a one-time rescue is multiplied over the lifetime of the relationship between guest and brand. Lifetime value is calculated by tracking the number of times they visit in a year, multiplying that number by the average per transaction spend, and then multiplying that number by the average number of years they’re a guest of your brand. Different demographic groups have different lifetime values. One large pizza chain estimated that the average lifetime value of a guest was around $10,000, and Starbucks says the lifetime value of one of their guests is over $14,000!

And value doesn’t stop there. Happy guests are also more likely to add even more value by influencing others to choose your brand.

The right technology will give you the ability to receive instant notifications when a guest requests follow up, automatically open and facilitate the successful management and closure of each case, and even check in with staff members to identify the root cause so you can prevent the problem from happening again.

3. Engage Your Employees

To your guests, your servers, cooks, and hosts are ambassadors of your brand.

Your employees are crucial to elevating the guest experience and creating more loyal guests. For many brands, the most talked-about aspect of their customer experience isn’t what went wrong. In fact, much of guest feedback is about the positive impact great staff had on their experience.

A few questions to ask yourself as you consider the role your frontline employees play in the guest experience:

Do they know how important their role is?
Do you have the right people in the right roles?
Do they feel valued and appreciated?
Are they receiving guest feedback about their performance—regarding both opportunities to improve, as well as appreciation?

The tried and true service profit chain model says that happy, engaged employees lead to happy, engaged guests, leading to increased revenue and profit.

However, what we’ve found is that this relationship is more reciprocal and bi-directional. The relationship between guests and employees is much more circular than linear. You can use the feedback and stories from your guests to help engage your employees. Consider the following comment left by a customer of a large restaurant chain:

“Everything was AWESOME!!! My food was hot, my server [NAME] was super nice and totally helped me out with my veggie burger. Plus she had a contagious smile the whole time, it really brightened up my day! I’m definitely [sic] impressed with the cleanliness of this [BRAND]. You guys rock and Thanks [NAME]!”

Now imagine if this story was shared with the employee. She would feel valued, appreciated, and motivated to continue to go above and beyond and create more of these “wow” moments with her guests. If this was shared with the rest of the team, they would be inspired to perform better as well.

Ensure your feedback partner has the analytics power to capture, understand, and instantly route notifications of these types of “wow” moments to targeted leaders in your business to ensure these positive behaviors are recognized and in a timely manner.

Using these types of stories from your guests to celebrate and recognize your team perpetuates a culture of positivity around guest feedback. Too often frontline employees look at guest feedback as punitive and damaging. And unfortunately some managers and leaders use it that way. Frontline employees should want to hear the guest stories whether positive or negative. Sharing the positive stories helps to create better dialogue and coaching moments between a frontline employee and their manager even when those negative stories come through.

The Result

Getting the most out of the feedback your guests provide will ultimately help your business thrive and succeed in both challenging and prosperous times. Study after study has shown brands that elevate the guest experience have higher stock prices, increased revenue, and reduced expenses. Temkin Group research shows even modest improvements in customer experience can be worth millions of dollars to restaurant brands.

So don’t wait! Begin elevating the guest experience—and their voice—at your restaurant now.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Written by Nate Morley

Reading time 8 minutes

Why SaaS Companies Need Net Promoter Score Feedback from End Users

If you are like most B2B SaaS company leaders, you send your buyers an Net Promoter Score survey out to gauge loyalty and solicit feedback. If you are focused on retention, you need to know the answer to the NPS question: How likely are you to recommend my product or service? However, you may be hesitant to ask the same question of the hundreds of end users of your product.

The fact is end users are your customers, too. After purchase it is your end users that must become the champions of your product. If they are unhappy they will tell your decision makers or, worse, let their feelings be known on social media.

Knowing what end users think of your product is invaluable, essential intelligence for your QBR.

Whether you are in Sales or Customer Success, here is how end-user feedback plays into your Quarterly Business Review with your key stakeholder. He or she may not know how happy or unhappy their people are with your product. But you do!

Scenario 1: End users are happy. Imagine being able to tell a VP of Product or CMO that end-users gave your product a 52 NPS, and rattling off some of the great verbatim feedback you’ve received from promoters. You’ve harnessed that brand advocacy. Now picture a competitor cold-calling your client. Is that VP even going to take the call and “explore other options”? No way. Not a good use of her time.

Scenario 2: End users aren’t so happy. That’s still good intel. You can be proactive. Let the decision maker hear it from you (they may already have heard from their people anyway): “Your team is achieving [a success goal], but they have definitely experienced frustration with this new feature of ours. We know it didn’t meet expectations, but I want to assure you that the fix is on our roadmap for Q2 and you will be the first to be upgraded…”

Either way, you are a proactive, knowledgeable and trustworthy partner to your stakeholders.

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

End-user NPS feedback will shape your product roadmap

Hearing directly, day in and day out, from end users provides a pulse of sentiment and qualitative feedback that Product teams need. There is nothing like hearing about a new feature directly from a user. And, users will identify a bug before the company can — you have an quality control army to support you. Some SaaS companies, like Magoosh, use in-app Net Promoter Score survey feedback to A/B test product versions for customer happiness. The product team at Hootsuite adds a feature to each quarterly roadmap that is derived from end user NPS feedback.

The Best Way to Survey End Users

Lengthy email surveys are not appropriate for end users. You need to know if users like your product, if they’d recommend your product, if it actually helps them in the way they need. You don’t need a lengthy survey to get actionable feedback from them. Plus, even if you do have their email contact information, that isn’t a channel they expect to hear from you in. If you send users a survey via email, they might not recognize who it is coming from.

Use in-app NPS surveys to get the information you need from users of your SaaS product. Surveys inside your SaaS application will give you the contextual feedback you need in real-time. And the best part is that a well-designed in-app survey is unobtrusive. It won’t interrupt the work that users are doing in your product. When a user opts to respond, it will only take them seconds to do so.

“The Wootric in-app survey is great. It’s non-intrusive, and it doesn’t block our customers from doing what they need to do in our dashboard.” Sterling Anderson, Customer Insights Manager, Hootsuite

Resistance to asking end users for feedback

Leading edge, customer-centric SaaS companies like New Relic, DocuSign and Consumer Reports have made the leap to asking end users for Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback. You may be struggling with the same concerns they had to overcome. Let’s run them down:

2. I don’t have a relationship with end users.

B2B SaaS companies often do not interact with the end-users of their product. Historically, even getting to the end user was nearly impossible. You may have communicated with one or several stakeholder decision makers that have signed off on the subscription purchase, but not had a single email address for the people actually using the product every day.

This is where in-app surveys truly shine. Users have an existing relationship with you through your product, and are more likely to give feedback when asked within the product experience.

2. The volume of responses is scary.

The idea of going from 2 or 3 survey responses per account to hundreds can sound overwhelming. With modern Voice of the Customer software platforms though, feedback is aggregated and analyzed for you–often using machine learning.

Sending surveys is automated as well. You don’t have to create survey “campaigns.” You can drip Net Promoter Score surveys and get constantly updated, real-time feedback. That way you’ll never miss a trend. Alternatively, you can trigger Customer Satisfaction or Customer Effort Score surveys at key points in the customer journey.

3. I don’t know how to respond to end-user feedback.

Depending on the feedback, you can respond in a couple of very productive ways:

You can send set up an auto-message to thank users for responding to the survey. This can be customized based on whether the user was happy or had a complaint.
Promoters, or highly satisfied customers, can be referred to Customer Success or Marketing for testimonials or case studies. Route unhappy end user responses to Customer Support for follow up.
If responding to each user isn’t feasible, one simple way to close the loop is to create a blog article that talks about the feedback you’ve received and what you plan to do about it.

4. Am I going to mess up my corporate KPI by surveying end users?

Segmentation can help here. Parse your metrics by buyer, admin and user, for example, to maintain continuity with previous buyer-only NPS data. If you believe that end-user feedback has value — there is a way!

5. Yikes. Am I REALLY ready to hear feedback about my product?

This may be the single greatest fear we encounter! It takes a brave business to ask for real, unvarnished feedback from end users. And it takes a smart business to know how to use that feedback to build better products and improve user experiences. It’s not for the faint of heart. But it is essential for businesses hoping to grow, gain referrals, and lead their industries. A modern Net Promoter Score software platform can help make this organized and manageable.

Modern CXM software will help you get it right.

End user feedback will tell you your strengths and weaknesses, which are both valuable information. Understanding what end users love can strengthen your relationships with the decision makers. Knowing where end users get into trouble puts you ahead of negative feedback at reviews, ensuring you’re prepared with a game plan to remedy the issue and keep the account.

Build end-user loyalty. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Updated July 24, 2024

Reading time 6 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

5 Ways to Guard Against Survey Manipulation

I’ve been in the automotive industry for some time and concerns about dealership attempts to interfere with the customer satisfaction measurement process have been around for a long time as well, but lately they seem to be intensifying. Do you know how to guard against survey manipulation? My hope is this blog will give you some things to think about, start a conversation, and help you understand my perspective on how manufacturers can work towards addressing survey manipulation.

Here’s what I’m seeing. The first step most manufacturers and suppliers take is to put processes in place to identify dealerships that attempt to manipulate survey results. While this step is extremely important it only addresses part of the problem. To effectively address this issue, manufacturers, dealers, and customer satisfaction measurement suppliers need to work together. And how they do that is by:

Establishing, communicating, and consistently enforcing consequences and a strong anti-manipulation policy
Designing survey systems that make manipulation of survey results difficult
Setting up systems and processes to identify dealerships that attempt to manipulate survey results
Defining acceptable practices and working with dealerships to implement them
Designing reward and compensation programs that minimize the motivation to manipulate customer experience measures

Establishing Consequences

Consequences of engaging in unacceptable practices need to be specified in advance and communicated to dealerships. These consequences need to be enforced if dealerships are identified as engaging in survey manipulation. Manufacturers will need to utilize consequences which they have the ability to enforce. Effective consequences include:

Assigning the lowest score to manipulated surveys
Requiring dealerships to reimburse the manufacturer for the cost of conducting their CSI surveys for the time period under which manipulation occurred
Denying customer satisfaction-based compensation or rewards to dealerships that have manipulated their scores
Subjecting dealerships that have been identified as manipulating their scores to audits of all or many of their manufacturer programs
Including language in the manufacturer/dealer franchise agreement that customer satisfaction survey manipulation is grounds for removal of the franchise

Making Manipulation Difficult

Manufacturers and their customer experience suppliers should design systems that make survey manipulation as difficult as possible. These systems need to be continually monitored and updated to address new methods of survey manipulation.

Some ways to make survey manipulation difficult include:

Use contact information that can be verified
Use manufacturer databases, not dealership management systems, as the source of sales and service samples
Don’t conduct point-of-purchase/point-of-service surveys
Use contact information that can reach all, or almost all, customers
Use multiple contact methodologies
Allow customers the option of remaining anonymous

Designing Processes to Reduce Manipulation

The less likely dealerships are to get caught manipulating survey results, the more tempting it will be for some of them to try. Therefore, processes need to be put in place to identify potential survey manipulation. These processes will be specific to the given project and the methodologies used, but can be broadly categorized as follows:

Examine customer contact records for suspicious mail or email addresses and phone numbers
Examine incoming materials including IP addresses
Examine customer comments
Examine contact resolution reports
Examine the actual data
Randomly audit survey responses
Include a survey manipulation question in the survey

Implementing Acceptable Practices

There are many practices dealerships can implement that both increase customer satisfaction scores and improve the customer experience. If manufacturers embrace these practices and work with dealerships to implement them, dealerships will have less need to engage in unacceptable survey manipulation. Some practices I have seen encouraged by manufacturers include:

Showing a blank survey to all customers and requesting that they fill it out honestly and return it
Asking customers if they are unsatisfied about anything regarding their experience and attempting to resolve the issue
Telephoning customers within a few days of a sales or service event, inquiring about their satisfaction, and engaging in appropriate efforts to resolve any dissatisfaction
Explaining the importance of receiving customer feedback for both the dealership and the manufacturer

Minimizing the Motivation to Manipulate

While it is important to hold dealerships accountable for their treatment of customers, and compensation based on customer satisfaction scores is the most obvious way to do that, I believe the way in which some reward and compensation programs have been designed has exacerbated the problem of dealerships attempting to manipulate the system. Some suggestions for setting up programs that minimize the motivation to manipulate results while still holding dealerships accountable for customer satisfaction are:

Compensate/Reward based on several desired business metrics of which customer satisfaction is only one.
Use a tiered compensation strategy rather than an “all or nothing” strategy.
Separate the dealership performance appraisal process from the dealership diagnostic process.
Require large sample sizes for determining scores.
Keep monetary rewards at a reasonable level so they remain rewards and do not turn into business necessities.
Consider non-monetary rewards

While many of these concepts and steps to reduce survey manipulation are all being done by most manufacturers, few are doing all of them together.

Don’t Forget You May Be Different

Survey manipulation is a systemic issue, but it affects vehicle manufacturers differently. Each manufacturer, with input from its dealerships, needs to decide what practices are acceptable and unacceptable. Each manufacturer needs to determine how seriously it wants to pursue this issue and how serious consequences should be to its dealerships who engage in unacceptable practices. This blog offers some guidelines and ideas manufacturers may want to consider when making these decisions. I’m always open to answer questions and I would enjoy hearing what you’re doing or your thoughts about survey manipulation, feel free to join this conversation on CX Café or check our webinar on survey manipulation.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

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Written by Dave Ensing, Ph.D.

Reading time 4 minutes

Is Your Company Really Customer-Centric? How You Handle Complaints Is the True Test

As long as there are customers, there will always be issues, complaints, and disagreements.

In fact, nearly every morning’s news report brings another example of a self-proclaimed “customer-centric” company failing—and shockingly, sometimes injuring—its customers.

Let’s be honest: Pleasing every customer, every time—while an admirable goal—is simply not possible. But failing to meet customer expectations doesn’t have to be all bad. In fact, it’s an opportunity to not only redeem the customer relationship, but—when handled with skill—also significantly improve it. There’s another, nearly-untapped benefit: It’s a chance to empower employees to take greater ownership of the customer experience (CX) and increase their own engagement in the process.

Customer complaints typically end one of two ways: They’re either resolved satisfactorily…or they’re not. When resolved successfully, customers are turned into loyal brand advocates while employees receive an enhanced sense of self-efficacy, a more positive CX orientation, and experience higher levels of motivation, confidence, and morale. However, a lack of resolution can drive customer churn and cause emotional exhaustion, frustration, and disengagement for employees over time.

A few years ago, we were working with the contact center of a leading financial services company and quickly identified an increase in the number of customers calling to check on the arrival statuses of their new credit cards. In an attempt to quell customer concerns over potentially lost or stolen cards, the company’s service agents acted quickly to void the original cards and ship new cards—overnight—to anxious customers. They were handling the situation exactly how they had been trained.

Taking additional calls, issuing new cards, and utilizing expedited shipping were additional expenses for the company—and were ultimately not addressing the root of customer concerns. In fact, immediately shipping a new card perpetuated the perception that the original card had been lost or stolen, and customer satisfaction continued to lag.

Aside from salvaging individual customer relationships, there’s much more to be gained from customer complaints. The one-on-one interaction between an employee and a customer is a unique, individualized, and often emotionally charged experience. And it turns out employees have a lot to say about it. In fact, one InMoment study found that 33% of employee engagement surveys contain feedback relating to an aspect of the customer experience. Frontline staff have a range of perspectives on the multitude of factors influencing the customer experience that individual departments or leaders simply cannot know. But collecting the intelligence that comes from this interaction—in a systematic, in-the-moment way—is rarely accomplished.

Back to the financial services company…Ultimately, it came down to trust. From the customer’s perspective: You sent me a new card, but what happened to my original? Why didn’t you do enough to protect my personal information and finances in the first place? However, in actuality, cards are very rarely lost or stolen in transit.

Using feedback collected from call center staff—both supervisors and agents—the company implemented new protocols to reinforce customer trust. It sent regular text and email tracking updates for cards. It retrained agents to place a special emphasis on the shipping window/anticipated delivery date of the original card and coached them to reiterate that timeframe to customers who called prior to the deadline. Not only did the company see a cumulative savings of approximately $3.5 million in a single year, but it increased customer satisfaction, trust—and employee moral.

How this particular organization handled these customer complaints said a lot about its culture. It listened to its customers and employees, empathized with the pain points of the customer experience, and worked together across the enterprise to take action. Most importantly, it promoted a culture where people felt empowered to speak up because they knew that the company had their backs.

How customer complaints are handled is the ultimate test of your company’s culture. It’s a microcosm of how your company thinks, feels, behaves, and adjusts. When opportunities present themselves, how do you respond? Are you reactive or proactive? What sorts of relationships do you have with your customers? Are you able to identify areas for improvement, notify key stakeholders, and take action? Do you have clear resolution practices that address specific complaints but surface broader insights? And most importantly, do your employees receive the training, support, and guidance they need to effectively solve customer concerns with genuine care?

By empowering your employees to have a voice in CX, and equipping them with the necessary tools to not only appease—but truly please—customers, everybody wins.

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Written by Dr. Paul Warner

Reading time 3 minutes

7 Quick Quotes on Closing the Loop with Your Customers

As a follow up to our recent white paper on resolving customer issues, we teamed up with CustomerThink for a webinar on closing the loop.

Led by InMoment’s SVP of Global Business Development, Erich Dietz, the webinar provided additional insights on closing the customer feedback loop more effectively, reducing business costs, increasing revenue, and creating loyal brand advocates.

Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite quotes and findings from the webinar:

“Get executives personally involved in closing the loop. It will build empathy for both the customer and the employee.” #CX #closingtheloop

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

91% of unhappy customers won’t return to your brand. Executing on the inner and outer loop leads to hard ROI.

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

Brand experience is found at the intersection of 3 questions: Why are you loved? What are you good at? Why are you different? #CX

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

What’s the good to great story? Some of the biggest ROI from closed loop is found in moving passives to promoters. #CX #closingtheloop

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

“Every metric in your business needs to have an owner.” #CX #closingtheloop

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

Don’t miss the opportunity to share what you’re doing with customer feedback. Communication is key.

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

Golden rule of CX: Don’t ask if you’re not willing to make changes. If you do make changes, tell your customers and employees. #CX

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

To learn specific best practices on closing the loop, you can watch a recording of the webinar.

Watch the Video – See InMoment in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Reading time 1 minutes

8 Innovative Ways to Use CX Metrics to Create Unbeatable Customer Experience

What we call Customer Experience (CX) is the total effect of each interaction between brand and customer over the course of the entire relationship (and it’s really all about how they feel). Positive feelings = effective CX, whether the interaction happens in a SaaS product, on a social media page, a website, over the phone, in person, or driving on the freeway.

This isn’t the same as User Experience – not at all.

Whereas UX is commonly concerned with evaluation of your product or website – a very limited scope – CX encompasses the entire experience of each customer from end-to-end, including touch points on your website, off your website, offline, on mobile, and person-to-person contact. You need both.

Fortunately, UX can be relatively easy to optimize.

Optimizing CX, on the other hand, can seem like an impossibly large task.

But keep in mind: CX is the sum total of specific, concrete, controllable occurrences. You know exactly when and how your customers interact with your brand, right? (No? You should – if it happens online, it’s all trackable). Your task then becomes understanding which CX metrics to track and how to use those metrics to create unbeatable – unforgettable – customer experiences for all.

Why is CXM so important?

Customer Experience Management (CXM or CEM) is a burgeoning field because CX heavily influences the likelihood of three very important actions:

Repeat purchases
Referrals
Complaints

Repeat purchases and referrals are growth engines, decreasing the cost of acquiring new customers, decreasing churn, and increasing lifetime value.

Complaints – especially public ones on review sites – are damaging, influencing untold numbers of prospects to look elsewhere for solutions.

CX can also act as a powerful differentiator in a sea of similar products and services. It’s a key to not only increasing revenue, but also gaining lasting competitive advantage. Studies have shown that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for better CX.

And, in a study published in the Harvard Business Review, researchers found that “Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.”

It should be a ‘no-brainer,’ but you know how the saying goes: What gets measured gets managed.

First, a summary of the CX measurements we will cover.

The Most Important CX Metrics to Track

- 1. Net Promoter Score
  2. Customer Satisfaction
  3. Customer Effort Score
  4. First Response Time
  5. Problem Resolution Time
  6. Contact Volume by Channel
  7. Social Listening Stats
  8. Referral & Review Rates

Now, let’s dig into each one.

8 CX Metrics: Definitions (and What to Do with Them)

- 1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
    
    Net Promoter Score is a simple survey that asks users to rate, on a scale from 1-10, how likely they are to refer the product/service to a friend or colleague. Those who score 9 and 10 are your promoters – they are delighted with your work and are more likely to buy more and bring their friends. People who score below a 6 are detractors. They are not having a good experience, not at all, and are very likely to tell other people about it!
    
    NPS is a classic “brand metric” but product teams, like those at IBM, are using NPS to improve customer experience.
  - How to use NPS for CX: We’ve written a whole book on this topic, but here is a new, innovative approach: Use an NPS threshold as a go/no-go milestone before launching a new product or feature out of beta.IBM is developing a new Slack-like communication product for their customers’ teams. Using IBM’s Watson machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities, this SaaS product can summarize channel conversations for those who don’t have time to wade through all the team chatter. The AI also aims to summon and post in-channel all relevant information about sales opportunities that are discussed by the team. When asked when the product will be on the market, Inhi Cho Suh, General Manager, Collaboration Solutions at IBM, proudly says, “There is no launch date.” She is measuring Net Promoter Score in this new SaaS application to capture real-time feedback, and says the product will only be released when it earns a satisfactory NPS from beta users.

Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Learn eight ways to optimize customer experience with a real-time approach to NPS.

- 1. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
    
    A CSAT survey asks a customer how satisfied they are with a recent interaction – often a purchase or customer service call – on a rating scale.
  - How to use CSAT for CX: This is an incredibly valuable metric to track when you’re trying to optimize for CX, because this metric will show you which specific interactions are most in need of improvement. It is most often used after an interaction with Customer Support. Use it as a compass to point you in the direction of where your attentions are most needed. Depending on your survey program, you can deliver these surveys in-app, and choose various survey formats – even an emoticon scale. Using CSAT at journey points is a new way of leveraging this time-honored metric. For more information on CSAT, check out our previous post.
  1. Customer Effort Score (CES)
    
    A CES survey asks the customer “How much effort did you have to expend to handle your request?” and is, perhaps, the most telling metric of how positive your customer’s experience has been. The harder it was for them to get an answer, the worse their experience, and the lower your CX. Some say “effortlessness” is the most relevant attribute of customer satisfaction. “If I had to choose only one KPI, I would use Customer Effort Score (CES). While the relative importance of effort as a driver of satisfaction differs depending on your company’s business model — e.g., selling shoes online vs. providing legal advice — it is a measure of one thing that all customers have in common: using your products and services should be as easy as possible. Nobody wants to expend more effort if given the choice.” – Mark Mollet, Customer Experience Manager at Helpling (source).
  - How to use CES for CX: Typically, you’ll deploy a CES survey after a customer support interaction. But, more and more SaaS companies are using these to gauge the effort required during the onboarding process (the point at which users are most likely to churn). The results of the survey will tell you how easy your onboarding process is, and you should see your numbers improve as you work to simplify the process.
  1. First Response Time
    
    This is the amount of time it takes a company to respond to a customer query. Customers expect very fast response times, and when brands don’t meet their high expectations, they become frustrated and CX drops. How fast is fast? Studies show that 53% of customers find 3 minutes to be a reasonable response time while waiting for a support agent – by telephone. Email is a bit longer at 24 to 48 hours, but the best companies, like Buffer, work on replying within one hour. And then there’s Live Chat – which requires a nearly instant response.
  - How to use First Response Time for CX: The faster the responses, the happier the customers – that’s a correlation that nearly always holds true. But, of course, if it were easy, everyone would do it! So how can we make faster response times easier? One way is by creating a Slack community for customers. ProdPad’s Director of Customer Success observed that email and Twitter weren’t creating the levels of customer engagement they were hoping for (which they knew because they were tracking those metrics). So they created a Slack community specifically for their customers to get instant, direct help, both from the brand and from other customers. Customers don’t even have to participate to get value – they can learn from everyone else. The results speak for themselves: 99% of their churn is from customers who are not part of the Slack community.
  1. Problem Resolution Time
    
    How fast can you solve a customer’s problem? Or, let’s put it another way: How many people does the customer speak with before the issue is solved? As a customer, there are few experiences more frustrating than speaking to someone who is incapable of solving your problem, then being bounced around to several other people who also are not equipped (not knowledgeable, not permitted, not empowered enough) to offer a solution. This is what Problem Resolution Time measures. You can get the answer with a simple survey, sent after a customer support interaction is completed, asking how long it took to solve the problem.
  - How to use Problem Resolution Time for CX: This metric serves to alert you to problems that affect the efficacy of your customer support program. You’ll probably need to do additional digging to get to the root of the problem (insufficient training? Are agents not empowered to handle issues without managerial oversight? Is it difficult to transfer customers to the appropriate person quickly?). You may not be able to find a quick fix, but once you solve these issues, your CX will improve drastically.
  1. Contact Volume by Channel
    
    Paying attention to volumes of calls and the number of inquiries you receive may not seem like the key to increasing customer happiness, but Buffer says it is. (Note: A high volume of service tickets isn’t necessarily a bad sign – it means customers want to be successful with your product. It’s the quiet customers you should worry about!)
  - How to use Contact Volume by Channel for CX: Buffer checks for spikes that indicate rushes in support traffic at certain times of day, which they then use to allocate service employees and resources so they are ready to meet demand. Of course, they always have a “buffer” to handle sudden support demands also. Not only does Buffer look for patterns in volume – they also track which channels their customers use most (emails, chat), and which questions are most frequently asked. That way, they know how cost effective it is to create a self-serve knowledge base, or find other methods to quickly and efficiently answer questions.
  1. Social Listening Stats
    
    Listening to the conversations happening about you via mention.com, or some other tool, and jumping into the conversation can create a community-like, welcoming customer experience that reaches very early in the sales funnel, all the way down to the Customer Success stage. Buffer is really good at this.
  - How to use Social Listening for CX: By monitoring your mentions in real-time, and allotting the human-power to respond in real-time, you’re creating an additional touchpoint with your brand – and another opportunity for positive, interactive, engaging experiences. The best part is: You’re doing it in public. Some potential metrics to use to help with social listening include how many people are talking about you, how many comments hashtag your brand, support reach-outs, Twitter chat participation, and of course, mentions.
  1. Referral & Review Rates
    
    Perhaps the most accurate measure of customer experience is the oldest: word-of-mouth recommendations (aka. referrals and reviews). NPS measures the willingness to refer, but only tracking actual referrals and reviews will give you the genuine numbers.
  - How to use Referral & Review Rates for CX: Tracking referrals and reviews requires a combination of social listening and a trackable customer advocacy program (which works hand-in-hand with tracking NPS to identify promoters early and encourage them to act). Referrals and reviews not only measure how successful your customer experience efforts are, they can also encourage a sense of personalization and interactivity – but only if you respond and reward these highly valuable behaviors!

Customer Experience is truly the key to retention and growth at its most fundamental levels. When customers love your products, enjoy working with you, feel good about asking questions (and getting prompt answers), and come out of each interaction feeling good about you and themselves, growth and profit are natural byproducts.

However, as natural as this is, when you need to create these positive experiences at scale, you have to track your successes and failures, understand which metrics have the most impact, and come up with creative ways to make your target customers smile at each touchpoint. It’s a tall order, true. But doable.

Improve CX! Sign up today for free NPS, CSAT or CES feedback with InMoment.

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Updated January 21, 2025

Reading time 10 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How to Keep Your Brand Relevant in the Ever-Changing World of CX (Pt. 2)

In my last article, I discussed how CX will ensure that brands are able to adapt to changing customer requirements in order to stay ahead of the competition. In part two of this article, I will cover why CX strategy cannot exist in a bubble and must continuously reflect the global environment, hopes, and innovative solutions that affect us all.

Economic, Political, and Social Factors Will Disrupt

In the UK, we are facing a series of challenges that may easily disrupt the flow towards better, more consistent experiences for customers. Let’s ignore what Brexit may do in the long term to human resource. In the short term, we know how inflation—affecting both food and fuel—changes shopping habits.

Recent articles have suggested that rising petrol prices will make customers adapt more of a convenience approach as we reduce car journeys in order to cope. However, history suggests that it may again be the high street stores that most suffer. Towards the end of the last decade, in order to counter the rising trend away from out of town shopping, the Big Four supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, and Morrisons) pushed out more money off coupons and price offers on fuel in their own forecourts. Customers were therefore compelled to take advantage of the cheaper fuel available there, and the convenience channel suffered. Customers also moved back to larger trolley shops, and the “all under one roof” grocery experience. The likes of Tesco and Asda saw their non-food category shares grow as a result.

With rising costs and reduced available cash forecasted in 2017, value for money will become more important as priorities are juggled. This should not be mistaken for a call for more price wars and risk a race to the bottom. Brands need to clearly set out their customer promise, making customers recognise that the brand cares about the experiences that they offer, and deliver against these expectations flawlessly.

There is a key role for CX to support in adapting to these times. When businesses struggle costs come under pressure, including the potential investment in customer experience solutions. It will be even more important to deliver clear ROI linked to their programmes, as well as setting out the longer-term strategic role to be realised. The brands that continue to invest and innovate will be the longer-term winners. CX sustains businesses.

Consumer Trends and the Demand to Take Responsibility

We began 2017 with a series of high profile stands against positions that many people felt uncomfortable. The movement, #DeleteUBER, showed the power that bad publicity could have on any business, with 200,000 customers deleting the app in the midst of the social noise generated around the first US travel ban. We subsequently saw different North American, but also internationally-focused brands, setting out their position and their values. VF Corp stated that they are a “company committed to inclusion”, where “diversity—among our people, our brands, and our consumers—is a source of competitive strength and organizational pride”. Levi’s reminded us all that Levi Strauss himself was an “immigrant”, and declared “empathy, originality, integrity, and courage are perhaps even more meaningful today than they were 163 years ago.”

Both brands were no doubt clear that being honest about what you stand for could be as important as what you do in the eyes of the customer. There are multiple ways in which a customer builds up an experience of a brand, and how you respond to external challenges is one of them. In a climate where the levels of trust are in such short supply, it pays to stand out for doing the right thing. Delivering great experiences, not just products, will count more in this new world.

Tackle 2017 with a Clear Purpose

In summary, trust needs to be gained, built, and retained by brands and CX can help pick up concerns quickly—and at a robust volume. Another clear role for the CX industry is to unearth the stories that show how worldviews are changing and allow businesses to act.

We know that to be successful brands need to focus on setting positive and long-term goals for their customer experience strategy. There need to be regular reminders of the progress being made against these objectives at a senior level to ensure focus and how the investment in the customer has delivered results that overshadow the investment involved.

CX is not only an operational solution, but should strategically support the brand purpose. An attitude of doing the right thing in order to build a sustainable, healthy, safe, and inclusive future should be considered a moral and commercial imperative for brands.

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Written by Simon Fraser

Reading time 3 minutes

Auto-Analyzing Sentiment in Survey Feedback Using NLP: How Do Customers Feel About Your People?

Wootric (now InMoment) uses CX metrics—Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score—to monitor customer experience for high-growth companies. We take a customer-centric approach to survey design. For example, our modern 2-question Net Promoter Score survey invites customers to elaborate freely on the reason for their score. We deliver millions of surveys that achieve response rates of 30-40%, generating thousands of pieces of unstructured customer survey feedback each week.

Why Is Survey Feedback Important?

Because when you communicate directly with your customers, they can identify exactly what works, what doesn’t work, and where the pain points are that may be detracting from their experience. Honest feedback gives you the insights you need to make improved business decisions and optimize the customer experience. As such, the right customer survey can play a significant role in increasing customer retention and helping your organization reach its goals.

Two Step in-app NPS Survey to collect survey feedback

Customer feedback comments are a treasure trove of information that can help a company shape their product and service for success. Until now it has been difficult for a Customer Insights Manager or customer experience management (CXM) teams to mine and aggregate qualitative data for insights that can guide business decisions.

Auto-Tagging with Sentiment Analysis

We recently announced early access to a new product feature: auto-tagging. For auto-tagging, we use our homegrown machine learning system along with Google Cloud Natural Language API to automatically categorize open-ended customer-survey feedback that our customers get as part of their NPS, CSAT and CES programs. The goal is to help companies put some structure to all of this qualitative data. We have a long list of customers eagerly waiting to get their hands on this feature. It’s a good problem to have.

In addition, we are developing the ability to identify the sentiment of the feedback. The goal is to determine not only what the customer was talking about, but to say whether the feedback is positive, neutral or negative. It is particularly complex to decipher multiple “sentiments” within a single comment.

Here is an example feedback comment that we received in response to a Net Promoter Score survey on our own production application (we practice what we preach):

“Setup guide for customizing social sharing on iOS SDK was confusing. Diego reached out with sample code which helped a lot.”

Wootric (now InMoment) is a SaaS product, so our auto-tagger uses a SaaS data training model and applies three tags to this survey response (Documentation, SDK, People), and assigns a NEUTRAL sentiment for the feedback as a whole. This obviously is pretty good, but we want to do more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dig deeper into survey feedback and apply sentiment for each tag as well? In the above example, the customer was not happy with the SDK Set-up Guide, but was pleased with Diego’s assistance. This nuance is buried under the overall NEUTRAL sentiment. Ideally, the Documentation and SDK tags would be identified as having negative sentiment, while the People tag would be positive.

We Can Identify Sentiment Associated with People, Team, Organization or Location

Buried survey feedback is not a trivial problem to solve. However, using Google Cloud Natural Language API’s latest feature called “entity sentiment analysis” we have made progress. We can already get sentiment for entities referenced in feedback where an entity is defined as People, Team, Organization and Location. In this case, Diego is an entity of type People and positive sentiment is correctly attached to it.

Example of Auto-tagging an InMoment NPS Survey Response

CUSTOMER LANGUAGE	AUTO-TAGS	SENTIMENT
“Setup guide for customizing social sharing on iOS SDK was confusing. Diego reached out with sample code which helped a lot.”		NEUTRAL
“Setup guide”	Documentation	future
“iOS SDK”	SDK	future
“Diego”	People	POSITIVE

A Business Use Case

Our customers often trigger a CSAT survey using our incoming webhooks and workflows when a support case is closed in their CRM system like Salesforce or Zendesk.

We notice that survey-feedback responses often reference a team or specific person that the customer has engaged with. Auto-tagging this feedback as “People” with applicable sentiment will provide these companies with an easy way to measure and track how customers are feeling about the people aspect of a company’s Customer Success or Support program.

Retain more customers. Start getting CX survey feedback today with InMoment.

In this Post

Why Is Survey Feedback Important?Auto-Tagging with Sentiment Analysis We Can Identify Sentiment Associated with People, Team, Organization or Location A Business Use Case

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Updated January 21, 2025

Reading time 3 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Read the Guide Now: InMoment Advanced AI – Supercharging CX

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Build an Integrated CX Program

2025 Consumer Trends Report

2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

1. It will help you measure and track the ROI of your CX program.

2. You can visualize and implement quick wins and long-term fixes.

3. You will stay ahead of the always-changing landscape.

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Understanding Expectations

Alignment

Building trust with your customers

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Why Should You Establish a Customer Success Program?

Customer Retention

Expands Business

Easier Future Acquisition

What Is Customer Success?

What Are Success Milestones?

How to Start a Customer Success Program

Step 1. Get to know your ideal customer really well (through qualitative data)

Step 2. Build Your Team

Step 3. Determine What Structure You Need to Help Customers Reach Their Ideal Outcomes

Step 4. Must-Have Metrics

Step 5. Collaborate

Step 6. Focus on One Thing at a Time

How it All Works Together

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

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Increasing the Number of Responses and Improving Representativeness

Improving Response Rates

Look at Both Sides of the Customer Cost/Benefit Equation

Considerations When Using Monetary Incentives

A Quick Look at Some Common Incentives

Conclusion

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1. Focus on Stories, Not Scores

2. Retain and Recover Guests

3. Engage Your Employees

The Result

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Knowing what end users think of your product is invaluable, essential intelligence for your QBR.

End-user NPS feedback will shape your product roadmap

The Best Way to Survey End Users

Resistance to asking end users for feedback

Modern CXM software will help you get it right.

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Establishing Consequences

Making Manipulation Difficult

Designing Processes to Reduce Manipulation

Implementing Acceptable Practices

Minimizing the Motivation to Manipulate

Don’t Forget You May Be Different

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See Our Software in Action

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Why is CXM so important?

The Most Important CX Metrics to Track

Net Promoter Score

Customer Satisfaction

Customer Effort Score

First Response Time

Problem Resolution Time

Contact Volume by Channel