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

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

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

Calculating Loyalty Used to be Hard

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

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

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

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this [product/brand/company/service]?”
“Why did you give us that score?”

Setting up an NPS program? Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Leverage customer feedback and drive growth with a real-time approach to NPS.

How SaaS companies use Net Promoter Score in practice

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

Quick path to high response rates & real-time NPS

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

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

Improved Net Promoter Score = higher loyalty

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

Taking action by Net Promoter Score segment

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

NPS is a journey, not a destination

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

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

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.

Reading time 8 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming Customer Experiences with VoC Data

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

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

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

What a Continuous Approach Looks Like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward

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

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

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

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

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

The Core Measures Every CXO Needs to Manage the Business

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

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

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

Culture, Engagement, and Advocacy

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

What we mean when we talk about culture and engagement:

Culture: How things get done around here

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

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

Navigating the Engagement Spectrum

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

Similarly, the engagement spectrum covers:

Disengaged → Engaged → Actively Engaged → Advocate

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

Three Practical Steps for Building Lasting Loyalty with Employees and Customers

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

No. 1 — Understand the Customer-Employee Connection

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

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

No. 2 — Develop a Partnership Between HR and CCO

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

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

No. 3 — Measure the Results

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

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

Look Inward First

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

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4 Rules for Uncovering Insights in Any CX Dashboard

We’ve all been there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Stop comparing apples and oranges.

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

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

4. Structured and unstructured data belong together.

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding our offering while boosting customer happiness

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

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

Wootric’s own Wootric NPS Dashboard – July 2017

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

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

Here are new features to back up this evolution claim:

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

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

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

But that’s all in the past!

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

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

AI-powered insights trained by millions of survey responses

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

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

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Updated January 28, 2025

Reading time 4 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How Telecoms Can Drastically Improve CX (Lessons from Comcast)

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

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

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

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

Make CX a strategic priority.

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

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

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

Give customers more control through transparency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empower your employees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Written by Erich Dietz

Reading time 3 minutes

3 Major Findings from Our New CX Telecom Report

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

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

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

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

1. That one-year mark is critical.

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

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

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

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

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

3. People still like people.

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

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

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

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Reading time 2 minutes

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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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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Reading time 14 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

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.

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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

Reading time 6 minutes

Calculating Loyalty Used to be Hard

How SaaS companies use Net Promoter Score in practice

Quick path to high response rates & real-time NPS

Improved Net Promoter Score = higher loyalty

Taking action by Net Promoter Score segment

NPS is a journey, not a destination

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

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Transforming Customer Experiences with VoC Data

What a Continuous Approach Looks Like

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

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Forward

The Core Measures Every CXO Needs to Manage the Business

Culture, Engagement, and Advocacy

What we mean when we talk about culture and engagement:

Navigating the Engagement Spectrum

Three Practical Steps for Building Lasting Loyalty with Employees and Customers

No. 1 — Understand the Customer-Employee Connection

No. 2 — Develop a Partnership Between HR and CCO

No. 3 — Measure the Results

Look Inward First

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

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

3. Stop comparing apples and oranges.

4. Structured and unstructured data belong together.

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

2025 Consumer Trends Report

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Make CX a strategic priority.

Give customers more control through transparency.

Empower your employees.

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1. That one-year mark is critical.

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

3. People still like people.

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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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