We’re well-intentioned. Really, we are. We Customer Experience professionals are passionate about customers and want to do everything within our power to improve their experiences. But in our rush to connect with our customers, we may actually be driving them away.

Understanding the customer experience your organization is delivering requires a lot of asking. We have a massive array of tools to delve into the state of our customer experience—from third-party perspectives like market research and mystery shop programs to transactional data that tells us how our customers behave.

The Ballooning Survey

One of the most powerful sources of customer intelligence is their direct feedback. And so we monitor social media, conduct exit interviews, and we survey. We love our surveys! So many lovely numbers that we can crunch, slice, dice, quantify, and measure. And as more groups within our companies discover the treasure trove of information within customer feedback, they want in on the fun. So the surveys get longer, and longer.

Our poor customers have become the victims of our exuberance. Slogging through question after question after question after question, most of which they couldn’t care less about. We have crossed the line—from earnest asker to unapologetic interrogator.

Feedback, a Positive Experience?

How do we balance our need to understand with our need to keep the feedback experience a positive one? Following are a few tips that will help you get even better data, while not just “doing no harm,” but actually improving your customers’ experience:

On Their Own Terms

The phrase “Customer Experience Management” is headed the way of the laserdisc. As a customer myself, I have absolutely no interest in having my experience “managed.” Today’s customers want more authentic relationships with brands, and they want to share their stories—but on their own terms.

Social Listening automates the process of finding and gathering feedback on brand- and location-level social sites, and in online review forums. You can view social feedback on its own or alongside other types of customer stories for a more holistic view. Links to social comments allow you to respond directly to customers.

Comment boxes are another incredibly valuable tool. Inside those four walls, customers tend to share details that give you specifics on exactly why they feel the way they do about their experience, and how you can either fix a problem or reinforce what’s working. In verbatim comments, customers also prioritize what’s most important to them, giving you the insights you need to focus on the areas with the most impact.

Actively Listen

While comment boxes are great, sometimes customers need a little nudge to get going—and keep talking. Active listening tools can transform a comment into a conversation, where you’re subtly letting your customers know that you’re listening. A familiar strength meter lets them know that you’d like to hear a little bit more. Follow-up questions based on their personal stories keep the Q&A focused and relevant to what they want to tell you.

Let Them Know

Customers want to know three things when they take the time to give feedback:

• That you heard them
• That you are going to act on what they said
• That the insights they shared will make a difference.

While few brands take these final steps, they are critical in building a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your customers. Today’s customers aren’t simply more demanding, they want to know that the time they spend makes a difference. Letting them know that you’ve heard them, and allowing them to peek behind the curtain at how you’re using their feedback to make positive changes, shows that you value them as human beings and as partners in an ongoing relationship.

End the Interrogation

It’s not okay to assault your customers during the feedback experience—even when you really, really, really want to know. It’s not nice, and it’s not necessary. With the right philosophy and tools, you can harness the important moment in your relationships with your customers to bring them closer—and get great data to crunch as well.

While many companies operate under the model of “If we build it, they will come,” the most successful companies know it’s essential to understand and actively engage with a targeted customer base.

At InMoment, we believe that no one owns the customer, but instead that everyone owns the experience. Both the customers and the company equally share in the brand experience, and both carry equal importance in decision making.

To develop strong customer relationships, brands must fully understand how and why their customers choose to interact with their company. In other words, they must learn to empathize.

Understanding Empathy

To begin, let’s explore what empathy actually is. Empathy is frequently confused with sympathy, when in reality, they can have greatly different outcomes when applied.

Both sympathy and empathy involve relating to and having concern for the feelings of other individuals. Sounds good, right? In most circumstances, either sympathy or empathy are appropriate responses. However, when developing a relationship with customers and clients, empathy always wins.

Sympathy is feeling compassion for another person. Sympathizing requires little emotional investment or intellectual effort and can often be misconstrued as pity. Empathy, in contrast, is the act of projecting one’s self into another person’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and circumstance to gain greater understanding—walking a mile in their shoes.

The Benefits of Empathy

So what does empathy have to do with your customer relationships? People want to build loyalty and relationships with brands. By knowing your ideal customer and understanding how to attract them—in other words, empathizing with their experience—you open the door to developing a great relationship.

With this relationship comes success. When you understand your target customer, you can fine-tune your brand experience to better meet their specific needs and wants. In turn, companies experience the following benefits:

• Understanding what drives loyalty towards their brand
• Learning how to turn negative feedback into an opportunity
• Increasing customer referrals and brand advocacy
• Maximizing the efficacy of InMoment’s customer feedback products

Actively listening and engaging with your customers’ perspectives—whether through one-on-one interviews, in-person observations, or through InMoment’s customer experience software—provides the highest ROI on your market research.

Creating an Empathy Map

What does this look like in practice? How do you actually get to know your customer? Copyblogger recently produced a comprehensive guide to understanding your customers’ worldview. Inspired by the user experience world, Copyblogger outlined the process of creating empathy maps for your ideal customers. These maps address four key areas in which customers interact with brands: thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing.

Copyblogger suggests gathering several key players to map out your brand experience, including stakeholders, customer support leads, vendors, product developers, and marketers. In this exercise, you’ll sit down together to discuss both experience and specific questions (What do our customers say or feel when they use your product? What are customers hearing from other people who use the product?), along with more personal, worldview questions (How do our customers think about their hopes and fears? How do our customers interact with family and loved ones?).

Some of these questions may seem fairly abstract in comparison to typical market research practices. This is what makes the approach such a success. By striving to understand your customers’ thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of your brand experience, you better understand your customer as a person, not just a source of revenue.

Dr. Frank Luntz describes the necessity of this abstraction in his book Words that Work. “The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart.” This “imaginative leap” will lead you to uncover the answers to questions that can truly revolutionize your business.

A Few Questions from the Imaginative Leap:

• What drives my customer to spend their money at my business?
• What pain points does my customer experience in their average day?
• Can I resolve any of these pain points?
• What pain points do customers experience with my brand?
• In what unique way can I improve my customers’ lives?

InMoment’s technology is the perfect complement to these empathy exercises. We develop all of our products to capture the voices, feelings, and stories of your customers and understand them in our platform.

Nan Russell, head of our Global Centre of Excellence, offers her expert advice to set your international customer experience management (CEM) programme on the right path and ensure your brand doesn’t get ‘lost in translation’.

The potential of going global with a brand is often an attractive prospect. Establishing an international customer base, favourable overseas economic conditions, and competitive cost of goods mean many companies seek to expand into new international markets. Their success depends on how well their brand offering is received by customers in each market, and a robust customer feedback programme is an essential foundational element to shape a brand’s development. But international consumer engagement is beset with pitfalls for the ill-prepared, as several well-publicised cases have highlighted.

We’ve all heard of some infamous international brand faux pas. Vauxhall had to relaunch its Nova model as the Corsa in Spain upon discovering the literal translation of ‘Nova’ in Spanish is ‘it won’t go’. Similarly, when fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first restaurant in Beijing, its famous slogan ‘Finger-lickin’ good’ was translated to ‘We’ll eat your fingers off’! In fact, numerous world-famous companies have stumbled when expanding into new markets, risking damage to their brand reputation and sales.

These days, social media quickly amplifies such mistakes around the globe, meaning those responsible for brand reputation have to work even harder to avoid the ‘bad translation’ (and resulting schadenfreude) at every stage of the customer journey. While it is essential for brands to engage customers in the language of the location, achieving this across borders and during every customer interaction poses a number of major challenges.

Don’t just translate the right words; use the right tone

It’s certainly not as easy as simply translating an invitation or survey from one language to another. Brands seeking to communicate their own brand values overseas must also consider local cultural values, rules of conduct, tone, and linguistic nuances such as humour and slang. Does the formal use of honorifics such as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ set the right tone for your brand in Japan, where their use is often mandatory? Or is your brand casual and breezy, and would your customers be more comfortable with a less formal approach?

Measure on the right scales

The cultural impact on market research scoring patterns is one of subtle complexity. On a 5-point scale—with 5 being the best score—does a 4 mean the same thing in Germany and Japan and Mexico? German schools use a rating system in which 1 is the best score and 5 would be near failing. Knowing the correct scoring scales to use in each market is crucial.

Use the right interpretation

Market and cultural differences in relative ‘hard’ or ‘easy’ grading complicate the use of American-designed indices, such as the Net Promoter Score. Customers in some markets would be shocked that their scores of an 8 (on a 10-point scale) are not considered Promoters. There is wide variance in how customers in different markets rate great service; it is important not to assign meanings that they did not intend.

Set the right targets

Once you’re using the right scales, how do you drive improvement? Many businesses want to set a single, global target. For example, every market is expected to achieve 70% on Overall Satisfaction. But the reality is that goal may be simply out of reach for markets that are ‘hard raters’; an Overall Satisfaction score of 65% may be much harder to attain in Germany than a 75% is in Italy.

The meaningful comparison typically is not the score but the improvement ratio. By targeting a level of improvement (for example, all markets are expected to improve six percentage points in the next fiscal year), each market can identify ways to drive their improvement within the relevant context.

Provide the right support

As part of that drive for consistent improvement, it is not enough to report scores; it is essential to support in-market teams with action planning tools. Location managers are often fluent in languages other than those spoken by the corporate executives. Reporting and action planning must be delivered in the language of the people driving the business on the ground.

The inexorable rise of mobile technology continues to shape the way we shop, dine out and use our leisure time. According to the latest figures from e-tail industry body IMRG and advisory firm Capgemini, while total online sales rose 18% year-on-year in December to £11.1bn, sales via mobile devices doubled to £3bn. Indeed, mobiles and tablet computers are now used for nearly 6% of all retail sales as Brits embrace shopping anytime, anywhere.

This trend presents both a challenge and an opportunity for brands in the eating and drinking out sector. With consumers increasingly carrying the technology around in their pockets, brands also have the opportunity to communicate with customers more frequently, and savvy brands are using technology to improve their guests’ experience.

Tablets are a driving force behind innovations in the front-end restaurant customer experience, whether in a quick service or a fast casual establishment. As more and more restaurants embrace tablet technology, there are several ways that they are revolutionizing the restaurant experience for brands and consumers.

1. Seamless Dining Experiences

Inspired by the ease of exceptional online buying events, guests value restaurants that provide seamless, hassle-free experiences from the moment they are seated through to the moment they pay. In many cases, restaurants are using tablets to offer table-side payment or other activities that streamline and improve the guest’s dining experience.

2. Cut the Queues

Fast food restaurants are using tablets to speed up the food ordering process and cut down on waiting time for customers. Orders can be taken from queuing customers on a wireless tablet to be ready for quick collection and payment at the counter, thus creating a positive brand experience.

3. Enhanced Interaction

Opportunities for enhanced interaction are prime targets for restaurants interested in improving customer experiences with tablet technology. Restaurants on the leading edge of tablet deployments have installed tablets at tables, allowing guests to interact with menus, place orders, pay bills and perform a range of other self-serve functions. Similarly, restaurants are exploring the use of promotional content or pay-as-you-go games that provide entertainment or customer engagement opportunities while guests wait for their food to arrive. These kinds of activities drive bottom-line improvements by leveraging customer experiences to increase loyalty.

4. “On the Fly” Data Insights

Tablets offer a non-threatening and engaging resource that restaurants can use to capture customer insights. While many guests are hesitant to provide personal information when they pay their bills or at the request of their servers, they are less resistant to providing data on their own terms, especially if the submission of data is tied to a discount or contest. Multi-site restaurants can leverage tablets to capture data insights at the local level, helping them tailor the customer experience to the desires and preferences of local consumers.

5. Guest Reviews

A great time to capture guest reviews is before they leave the restaurant, while details of the experience are top of mind. Willingness to provide feedback is also much greater with this immediacy, since even the most satisfied guests often don’t feel compelled to rate their experience later. In the restaurant industry, reviews are a key element in customer acquisition, and table-side tablets offer a ready-made resource for encouraging guests to share feedback about service, cuisine or other aspects of their experience. Reviews captured via tablets can then be used to build brand reputation and modify the customer experience based on guests’ suggestions.

6. Multichannel Feedback

Consumers use many different touch points to connect with the restaurant brands that are important to them. Surveys and other tools delivered on tablet devices create feedback that can be shared across all available channels, increasing the impact of brand advocacy and positive mentions. In particular, restaurants need to prioritize the use of tablets to capture feedback that can be distributed via social channels.

7. Enhanced Employee Engagement

One of the largest challenges with customer feedback is how to use the results when they arrive. Tablets can help to reshape this challenge by bringing results to life in a meaningful way to customer facing staff. Data visualization capabilities on tablets are extensive, but again the challenge is more than simply presenting guest feedback in a “pretty” way; it’s presenting it in a meaningful way that motivates staff and will drive guest experience improvement.

The real innovation in the use of tablet technology is that it enables restaurant brands to forge meaningful, direct connections among guests, restaurant managers and their staff. The deployment of table-side tablets gives guests more immediate options, inviting them to participate in activities that strengthen their relationship with the brand.

Just as importantly, tablets can significantly improve a restaurant’s ability to capture feedback and provide local guest insights—important factors in the brand’s ability to create and deliver enhanced customer experiences.