When it comes to starting a customer experience (CX) program, the right vendor (and solution) can make all the difference. Choosing the right vendor for your CX program can be a critical decision, as it can have a significant impact on the outcome of your program. The right vendor will not only provide the necessary tools and technology, but also bring valuable expertise and experience to the table. They can help you identify your business’s specific CX needs, develop a tailored plan, and implement it successfully. 

With the right vendor, you can ensure that your CX program delivers the desired results and improves your customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. When it comes to what type of CX solution you want to implement, there are two options to choose from: a full-service program or a self-service program. 

What Is a Full Service CX Solution?

A full-service CX solution refers to a CX partnership where the company that provides the platform manages all aspects of the technology (programming, analysis, change management, etc.)

This brand/CX vendor relationship is services driven, and a brand that purchases this type of solution can expect to have a dedicated team of experienced CX and technology experts to check in with regularly (sometimes as often as every week with additional calls if needed) to help the brand with every aspect of their CX program. A full-service CX vendor will help your team define strategy, implement the technology, train team members, craft surveys, import other customer data, design reporting dashboards, and beyond.  

What Is a Self-Service CX Solution?

A self-service CX vendor refers to a situation in which a person or persons within the purchasing organization are responsible for all aspects of the ongoing technology usage.

A brand purchasing a self-service CX solution can expect to have full control and autonomy in their CX initiatives. There is often a dedicated implementation team, but post implementation, there is more likely to be a helpline or contact the brand can reach out to in case of an error or if they’re in need of help.

Of course, there is a gray area between the two categories. A CX vendor that emphasizes true partnership will emphasize that customer experience is not one size fits all, and will therefore offer a blend of self-service and support-driven options to fit your needs. For example, a vendor may offer DIY survey tools alongside strategic insight sessions. 

Self-Service v. Full Service: How to Determine Which Is Right for You

A full-service program can be a great choice if you’re short on resources or if you want to outsource CX management to an expert team. With a full-service program, you’ll be able to fill in any gaps in resources or skill sets with the considerable expertise your full-service CX vendor has on staff. Your dedicated team will be infinitely familiar with your business, goals, and program.

A full-service CX solution will also help you to drive more long-term strategy for your program. Check-ins will help you to stay accountable to goals, and your vendor will be able to advise you on any challenges, as well as connect you with other CX professionals in your industry. 

On the other hand, a self-service program may be a better option if you have the expertise and resources to accomplish your CX goals in-house. With a self-service program, you can make changes to surveys or other initiatives in the middle of the night if you want to. 

Additionally, self-service programs can be more cost-effective in the long run, since you won’t be paying for the vendor’s management services.

Take Our Quiz and Get Started

Ultimately, the decision between a self-service and full-service CX program depends on a variety of factors, including the size of your organization, your budget, and your technical expertise. 

Click below to take the quiz and find out whether a self-service or full-service CX program is right for your business!

QUIZ

Self-Serve v. Full Service CX Program: How to Determine Which Is Right for You

Looking to choose a CX technology vendor? Here’s the first question you need to ask yourself: are you looking for a self-serve solution or a full-service solution? The answer will determine how much support your team receives, the expertise you have access to, where your team will spend their time, and more! On the fence about what’s right for you? This quiz will help you decide.

Take the Quiz

Forrester predicts that in the next year, one in five customer experience (CX) programs will disappear, but one in 10 will be stronger than ever. The pressure is on for all CX practitioners—but small CX teams are feeling the heat the most. But just because you have a small team doesn’t mean you can’t make a major impact.

In our over two decades of experience, we’ve worked with many small-but-mighty teams of around one to three people. And though it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you have big obstacles but limited resources, we’re here to tell you success is possible—if you use your time wisely. 

That’s why it’s absolutely crucial to focus on CX strategies that help your organization get the most out of your program. What strategies will support CX success for your small team? Keep on reading to find out!

4 Strategies for Success With a Small CX Team

#1: Focus on Quick Wins

Much like baseball, customer experience is a game of singles. You can’t magically tackle every customer issue at once—especially with limited resources. Instead, you need to understand what most negatively impacts a specific customer journey and focus on solving that problem. Then line ‘em up, and knock ‘em down. 

For example, let’s say that your call center data shows customers frequently complain about the log in experience for their online account. Then you know you need to dig into the call transcripts and other available unstructured data to understand what about that experience is making such a negative impact on your customers. (Get a step-by-step guide on how to do this here.)

#2: Lock In Your Executive Champion

To get your CX program started, you likely needed an executive sponsor. But in order to have long-term impact, you need to maintain their support. 

This may be easier for the 53% of CX practitioners who say their executives want their firm to be a CX leader, but for the other 47% percent, making an exec-friendly business case is everything. Your team will need to craft a compelling story, leverage strong visuals, and prove tangible ROI to really knock it out of the park! 

Sound a bit overwhelming? Don’t worry—we’ve put together a guide to crafting your CX business case here.

#3: Sell Your Program Internally 

With your executive sponsor in place, now it’s time to sell the rest of your organization. Realistically, you won’t be able to get every employee to buy-in—that’s why you need to sell your program to key individuals that can help you to take action and influence other team members. 

How? You need to adopt a salesperson approach to your own program. Make it clear to team members in other departments exactly what they can gain from CX insights: optimized processes, access to data that can inform decision making, and wins of their own.

#4: Leverage Your CX Partner

Having a small CX team or even just one CX employee can mean that it’s hard to validate ideas or discuss new ones. In fact, four out of five CX teams will lack critical design, data, and journey skills. And that’s understandable when you have a small team—you can’t be absolutely everything for everyone. 

Luckily, you can lean on your CX partner as an extension of your team, especially if your vendor provides you with dedicated services and team members!

Your Next Steps

Now that you understand the four strategies for success, it’s time to make an actionable plan to turn those strategies into a reality. 

To get you started, we’ve put together a step-by-step checklist for your team. In it, you’ll find a manageable task list that will help you lay a strong foundation for each of these strategies, and there’s even an advanced checklist to take your success even further. 

Start proving the value of your small-but-mighty CX team today and download your CX strategy checklist below!

CHECKLIST

How to Craft a Max-Impact CX Strategy for a Small CX Team

Having a small CX team doesn’t mean you can’t make a big difference. What it does mean is that you have to use your time wisely! Download this checklist for step-by-step instructions on how to realize four strategies designed specifically for CX teams like yours.

Download Checklist

It’s Time to Level Up

For your small CX team, every second counts. You simply don’t have time to waste with a vendor that doesn’t work for you or understand what makes your business different. 

At InMoment, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions or set-and-forget programs. Our award-winning technology is built to integrate into your existing tech stack and align to your business goals. And our expert services? Your dedicated team is with you every step of the way. You are always able to reach out to an expert who is intimately familiar with your program—not merely dial a 1-800 help center.

That’s why InMoment customers give us 4.9/5.0 Stars and a 100 “Would Recommend” User Rating.

Want to learn how InMoment can help you maximize your CX strategy? Let us show you!

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) is essential for any organization to remain relevant and successful. However, many businesses struggle to find success with their CX program because of  organizational silos. 

What Are Organizational Silos?

The term “organizational silos” refers to the condition in which different teams or departments within a company operate in complete isolation from one another. This isolation hinders overall collaboration and the sharing of information and data, making it almost impossible to execute on a business-wide initiative that requires the buy-in from multiple teams across the organization.

How Do Organizational Silos Impact the Customer Experience?

This challenge likely sounds familiar to CX professionals. After all, a successful CX program needs to be able to collect data across channels and touchpoints, pinpoint friction points wherever they exist, and then take swift action.That simply cannot happen with silos in place, and that’s why organizational silos can have such a significant negative impact on the customer experience—they make it essentially impossible to improve experiences. 

Wondering if organizational silos could be at the root of your CX challenges? Today, we’ll explore the symptoms of CX silos within an organization and why breaking them down is crucial for achieving your CX goals. We’ll also provide practical tips and strategies for bridging these silos and fostering a customer-centric culture within your business.

The Symptoms of Organizational Silos

Organizational silos refer to the situation where different teams or departments within a company operate in isolation from one another, hindering collaboration and the sharing of information. This can have a significant impact on the quality of the customer experience delivered by the organization. But how do you know if your company is suffering from silos that are negatively affecting the customer experience? Here are some signs to look out for:

Executive Level:

• Lack of Organizational Efficiency 
• Misaligned Resources
• Competing Organizational Objectives
• Ineffective Process

CX Specific:

• Consumer Data Silos
• Limited Insights
• Duplicative Efforts
• Feedback Disarray 

If any of these signs resonate with you, it may be time to take a closer look at the silos within your organization and take steps to break them down. In the next section, we’ll discuss the impact that silos can have on the customer experience and why it’s crucial to address them.

The Negative Impact of Organizational Silos

Silos within an organization can have far-reaching consequences if left unaddressed. The negative impact can be felt across the entire organization, from customers to employees to the bottom line. Here are some potential outcomes of silos:

Customer Churn:

• When different departments are not aligned on the customer experience, it can lead to a disjointed experience for the customer. This can result in frustration and dissatisfaction, leading to churn and lost revenue.
• Customers may seek out competitors who can provide a more seamless experience.

Employee Turnover:

• When teams are working in silos, it can lead to a lack of collaboration and communication, making it difficult for employees to work together effectively. This can result in a negative work environment and a lack of motivation among employees.
• Frustrated employees may look for opportunities elsewhere, resulting in high turnover and the loss of valuable talent.

Excessive Costs:

• Duplicative efforts and inefficiencies can result in excessive costs, both in terms of time and resources.
• Teams may be spending time and money on initiatives that are not aligned with company goals or customer needs. This can have a negative impact on the bottom line, with costs eating into profits.

In order to avoid these negative outcomes, it’s essential to address organizational silos and foster a culture of collaboration and communication. 

So, What Is the Prescription for Organizational Silos?

You know the symptoms of organizational silos, and what the negative effects may be. But what are your next steps going to be?

In our over 45 years of experience, we have helped organizations of all sizes break down organizational silos. As a matter of fact, we have developed a 3-step organizational silo treatment plan to help you do just that. 
Join two of InMoment’s brightest minds, VP of Customer Success Will Huffman and Manager of Program Excellence Angela Zieres as they walk you through our 3 step treatment plan that won’t just improve your CX program, but it will also improve your business!  Watch it here!

WORKSHEET

Discover Your Customer Experience

 A Guided Exercise to Help You Understand the Current State of CX at Your Organization

So, you’ve been charged with leading a company-wide CX initiative. But where do you even start? Likely, customer experience efforts are already being made in different pockets of your organization, but it’s up to you to break down the silos and connect the dots. This worksheet will guide you through an exercise to do just that!

Download Worksheet

Mary Anne Ghobrial is the director of Australia’s largest customer experience event—The Customer Show. Because she speaks to thousands of client-side professionals and many vendors, she gets an insider view of how the entire industry is structured, giving her a unique perspective on the CX market. . 

InMoment’s Simon Benns sat down with her on the recent XI Cafe Podcast to chat with Mary Anne about what you can expect to see at The Customer Show this year, as well as getting Mary Anne’s insider knowledge as to what are the key trends and concerns for CX professionals in APAC. Here’s an overview of their Q&A: 

What Is the Customer Show?

The Customer Show launched in 2022, and the premise behind the event is to bring together everyone playing an active—or even a passive—role in the customer journey. The team used to run smaller events for different business units, but they soon realized it would be more valuable to bring together all the silos of the organization—marketing teams, senior leadership teams, data teams, employee experience teams, product teams, and, of course, the customer experience team under one roof.

From a bird’s eye view, there are 2,500 expected attendees for this year, 50 exhibitors, 100 speakers—and Mary Anne organized all of it! 

What Is the Purpose Behind the Customer Show?

All brands know that customer experience is important—delighting customers is the name of the game. There are many ways to do that, but the result is to give good experiences to customers. The event is designed for attendees to actually learn how to work collaboratively across the organisation.

Different teams have different goals and incentives. For instance, the marketing team might focus on driving loyalty and retention. CX teams will have more impact if they work with the marketing function’s unique goals and align their priorities to reach the end goal: delivering great customer experiences.

Think of it like building a house. You’ve got individual people building the foundation but you need project managers to take on different parts of the process. As with building plans, your CX program also requires a strategy and multiple people working together collaboratively to execute it. The overarching idea is to ensure all different business parts are working toward the same goal. 

What Are Your Views on Customer Experience as a Centralized Versus Decentralized Function? 

When customer experience is centralized to one department, it won’t have a strong impact. Ultimately, customer experience should be decentralized so that the strategy can spread to every department. 

A company that has decentralized customer experience really well is Medibank. The healthcare business had one of the biggest corporate turnarounds in Australian history, largely due to its commitment to customer centricity. Medicare appointed cross-functional squads that took customer insights (using data to back it up) and then tested which insights would have the biggest impact before deciding which CX initiatives to invest in. The team also implemented a re-measuring step to confirm which initiatives would have the biggest impact, then re-measuring to see if it worked. 

What Are Some Tips for Delivering AND Demonstrating Impact? 

Forrester predicted that 1 in 5 CX programs would disappear soon—mostly due to a lack of ability to demonstrate impact and prove ROI of their CX projects. That being said, it’s extremely important for CX professionals to learn how to deliver and demonstrate the impact of their programs. 

It’s one thing to get the actual insight from your customer data, and it’s another to demonstrate the impact that insight will have. 

When it comes to delivering and demonstrating insights, Mary Anne’s tips are:

• Align every department to customer experience by aligning your CX priorities to the priorities of each individual business unit 
• Make sure you use your feedback to understand what customers actually value
• Create strategies—or even micro strategies—that can deliver what customers want
• Identify one of the four pillars of ROI to start pointing your CX program to: customer acquisition, customer retention, reduction in cost, cross- and up-selling 
• Understand your business’ “why” before implementing a CX program
• Use true driver analysis to see if what you think is important to the customer is actually important 

What Is the Best Way to Know Which CX Initiative Will Have the Biggest Impact? 

It’s art and science to determine which lever is the easiest to pull. Figure out what will actually be the most important to the customer. For example, when it comes to insurance, fees might be the most important thing to a customer, but that’s not necessarily something you can change from a CX perspective. Instead, maybe look at the call center and see if you can identify another customer issue that could deliver a similar impact. 

And when it comes to making changes across the business, you don’t want to take on too much at once. If you do a complete rehaul of multiple aspects, it might shift the brand promise, and cause customer confusion. You want to make incremental changes to actually shift the culture and sustain the program, not lose steam by taking on too much at the front end. At InMoment, we recommend a continuous improvement framework to help you keep incrementally evolving your CX program.

How Is InMoment Involved in the Upcoming Customer Show? 

As the 2023 Customer Show Foundation Partner, InMoment will have a representation at the panel “CX is an Outcome, Not a Strategy: Moving Towards an Era of Improvement Management Through Top Level Buy-In” on the NextGen CX Panel at 3PM on Wednesday 3rd. InMoment’s Head of Customer Success, John Harb will join the panel to discuss:

• How to ensure your customer experience strategy is flexible enough to shift based on changing behaviours
• How to understand your customer behaviours and journeys by tracking their trends regularly
• The steps involved in integrating experience improvement methodologies across the organisation

The Customer Show is also giving away a $10k holiday prize—go to InMoment’s stand and get a stamp for your Customer Show passport, and at 2pm on Day 2, a winner will be chosen.

When and Where Is the 2023 Customer Show? 

Date: Wednesday, 3 May 2023 & Thursday, 4 May 2023

Location: Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

1 Convention Centre Pl, South Wharf VIC 3000

Where to Listen to the Full Conversation

You can listen to the full conversation with Mary Anne and Simon on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts. But, if you are eager to jump right in then you can click the play button below to start listening now!

More of a visual person? No worries. You can also find the video recording on our YouTube channel!

As businesses strive to improve their customer experiences, asking for feedback has become a common practice. However, not all feedback is created equal, and simply collecting feedback for the sake of it may not lead to meaningful insights or improvements.

In a recent appearance on the ReThink Productivity Podcast, InMoment’s Vice President of CX Strategy, Simon Fraser, discussed the importance of understanding why you are asking for customer feedback in the first place.

Fraser emphasized the need for businesses to have clear objectives and a strategic approach to collecting and utilizing feedback. He explained that businesses should identify the specific outcomes they hope to achieve through feedback, whether it be to improve customer loyalty, identify areas for operational improvement, or measure the success of a new product or service.

Fraser also stressed the importance of tailoring feedback collection methods to the specific needs of the business and its customers. This could include using various channels such as surveys, social media listening, or customer interviews, as well as considering factors like timing, frequency, and the types of questions being asked.

By taking a more strategic and tailored approach to customer feedback, businesses can gain deeper insights into their customers’ experiences and make more informed decisions to drive business growth and success.

Listen to the full episode to hear ReThink’s Simon Hedaux talk with Simon about:

• Asking for customer Feedback?
• Chat GPT
• Supervised Machine Learning & AI
• Tailored Feedback Modeling

Where to Listen to ReThink Productivity’s Episode With Simon Fraser

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts. But, if you are eager to jump right in then you can click the play button below to start listening to this week’s episode!