However, there is a solution. Companies don’t have to stay stuck merely “managing” their experiences. We’ve put together three proven steps that companies can follow to take their program, and thus their brand, to the top:

1. Determining Business Objectives
2. Gathering The Right Data
3. Taking Intelligent Action

Step #1: Determining Business Objectives

Traditionally, many firms have been in such a hurry to start listening in on their customers’ tastes and preferences. And while this eagerness is admirable, it often results in wantonly turning listening posts on everywhere and waiting for insights to roll in. Listening is important, yes, but listening passively is worlds different than listening intently. The former focuses on gathering metrics, feeding those metrics into a piece-by-piece reactive strategy, and calling it a day. The latter calls for businesses to firmly establish what they want to achieve with their experience program before turning any ears on.

There are several merits to determining business objectives before listening to customers, and they all have to do with looking before leaping. First, companies need to decide what business problems they want their experience program to solve. Foregoing this step and listening for the sake of listening is why so many programs either fail or provide ROI that’s murky at best.

Additionally, companies can take considering objectives as an opportunity to tie their experience programs to financial goals. Like we just said, it’s hard to prove a CX initiative’s ROI if it has no clear objective beyond just listening to customers. Spelling your program’s goals out in financial terms gives CX teams a hard number to work toward—then, when that number is achieved, those teams will have a much easier time using that achievement to leverage additional funding in the boardroom.

Step #2: Gathering The Right Data

There’s another reason why it pays to stop and think before turning listening posts on in every channel: some customer segments are more worth listening to than others. This idea may sound a bit callous, but think about it—a listening program geared toward evaluating a loyalty program is going to be much more useful if it hones in on long-term customers instead of casting a net all over the place.

This notion is also known as the concept of gathering the right data. It’s okay for brands to use different listening posts for different audiences—in fact, this strategy is much more likely to garner useful intelligence. Thus, it’s just as important for companies to consider their audiences as it is concrete financial goals when it comes to experience programs. The right data can yield the right intelligence, which can enable brands to take the right steps toward transformational success.

Step #3: Taking Intelligent Action

Much of the work in this step will already have been done if companies follow the previous two steps correctly. Like we said, it’s a good idea for brands to look before they leap and carefully consider what they hope to accomplish with a listening program. Yes, the goal of “listening” is all well and good, but the problem with experience management is that the buck stops there. Take your CX aspirations further than gathering metrics and decide what that listening is meant to accomplish. More customer acquisition? Retention? Lowering cost to serve? Set those goals and attach dollar amounts to them.

Then, take some time to consider which audiences you need to listen to in order to achieve those goals. Arming yourself with concrete goals and intelligence from the right audiences will enable your organization to take the meaningful action it needs to reach the top of its vertical, make a stronger bottom line, and create an emotional, connective experience for both customers and employees. Companies can use these steps to move the needle and take their program from experience management to something far more profound: experience improvement.

Want to learn more about how CX programs can move the needle and create lasting success for businesses, customers, and employees? Check out our new POV article on the subject, written by EVP Brian Clark, here.

The post 3 Simple Steps That Make Your CX Program Actually Move The Needle appeared first on InMoment.

This morning, customer feedback management (CFM) vendor InMoment announced an array of new product and service offerings focused on improving experiences, not just measuring and reporting on them. The vendor is calling this Experience Improvement (XI).

This is an aggressive move by InMoment: Customer experience (CX) technology buyers struggle to find differentiation among technology vendors and often forget that technology is just one piece of the puzzle. It takes people, process, and technology to transform and improve CX. The new offerings also highlight the fact that when it comes to measuring CX, surveys are not enough. Today’s environment requires a different approach, one that my colleague Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian and I discuss a lot in our research.

InMoment has been establishing the foundation for this over the past few years. And the merger of InMoment and MaritzCX earlier this year better equips the vendor to deliver on this promise through a blend of technology and services. It even introduced new technology and data products like XI Workflow for complex data management and services like XI Transformation and XI Outcome Linkage.

That said, companies must be willing to change their approach to CX in fundamental ways, which continues to be a major challenge at many firms. I encourage CX pros to take a step back and to assess what is and is not working with their current approach — and consider what it takes to drive real improvements.

Read InMoment’s announcement here.

The post InMoment Addresses Head On What Continues To Plague CX Programs appeared first on InMoment.

The post Stop Managing Experiences—Start Improving Them appeared first on InMoment.

Making and keeping promises can be a tricky business for companies. Organizations oftentimes end up overpromising, underdelivering, or both. Couple that with customers having more means than ever before of telling their friends about a negative experience, and the result is broken promises that scar, not just smear, a brand’s reputation.

Today, we’re going to touch on a point I talked about in a recent POV on the impact of broken brand promises: implementing a strong loop-closing process that can help companies keep their promises and keep at-risk customers from becoming powerful brand detractors.

Closing the Inner Loop

Closing the inner loop means addressing and solving individual customer complaints. This process is crucial to making customers feel heard and can often make the difference between promises kept and promises broken. Closing the inner loop is an essential component of any experience improvement strategy because it helps brands not only know what customers expect of an organization, but also enables companies to intercept and deal with threats to brand promises.

Companies can tackle closing the inner loop by, well, looping employees into the process as much as possible. Customers enjoy a personalized experience, especially when they’re frustrated with an impending broken promise, and an employee who cares is the best way to make those individuals feel empathized with. Brands can also use this tactic to learn about pain points they may not even be aware of.

Listening is an important piece of keeping brand promises, but it’s only half the battle. After fielding concerns from a dissatisfied customer, brands must work quickly to take action on that feedback or else risk both losing the customer and breaking a brand promise. Brands can help ensure that departments take action on relevant feedback by sharing data across the organization rather than keep it siloed with a customer experience (CX) practitioner or team.

Closing The Outer Loop

A brand’s success is built upon many instances of closing the inner loop, and when the enthusiasm for listening to and solving customer problems is diffused across an organization, that brand will have closed the outer loop. The outer loop is a company culture that espouses fixing pain points and keeping promises wherever possible. A company committed to keeping the outer loop closed is a company that democratizes data, shares feedback throughout the organization, and uses that unity to take effective action. Naturally, this is a must for brands that want to keep their promises.

These reasons and more are why a strong loop-closing process is essential to listening to customers, resolving issues, and leaving those individuals feeling like the brand has both taken them seriously and resolved to keep a commitment (as it happens, I also wrote a POV on this and other reasons to close the loop, which you can check out here).

As I said earlier, making and keeping promises is tricky. But closing the loop can save at-risk customers, identify pain points, and give companies the opportunity to both keep promises and create a stronger bottom line for themselves.

Interested in learning more about brand promises and their far-reaching impact? You can check out more in my article on the subject here.

The post How Closing The Loop Helps Companies Keep Promises appeared first on InMoment.

While it’s true that government assistance has somewhat helped some customers bide their time, many financial institutions still anticipate that the Coronavirus has created long-term problems when it comes to credit payments and paying back loans. This is especially true for credit, which many customers have had to rely on to tide them over until they can return to work or find a new job.

The point here is that the pandemic has fundamentally changed why customers seek out credit cards. It used to be that customers typically considered the perks when it came to choosing a credit card: travel rewards, hotel rewards, club access, and the like.

Now, though, customers are less concerned with fun perks for tomorrow than benefits that can fit their needs right now. Today. The result has been a shift in customer taste toward credit cards that offer:

• Cashback rewards for groceries, gasoline, utilities, and other necessities
• Cards that offer discounts on or savings for necessity shopping
• Consumer rewards that can be spent immediately

Though it can be said that customers are also less interested in travel perks because of the pandemic’s effect on vacationing and airlines, the primary reason that they’re shifting toward credit cards that offer cashback and immediate reward perks remains because of the aforementioned economic woes that this crisis has brought with it. This brings us back to the long-term credit payment problems I mentioned earlier, and what card providers can expect customers to want for the foreseeable future.

For a start, and perhaps to no one’s great surprise, customers are currently gravitating toward the cards that offer the most generous forgiveness for missed payments and deferrals. The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded many customers almost no flexibility in that area, which has many of them on the lookout for perks like this.

Similarly, customers are looking for cards that are forgiving when it comes to late payments, as well as that have low minimum payment requirements and interest rates. To many customers, especially individuals who have been laid off, these benefits are a must because they afford a great deal of flexibility at less cost. As we mentioned earlier, these perks have become far more attractive than travel or leisure benefits in a remarkably short time.

Finally, customers have also become far more attracted to credit cards that do not punish or inhibit frequent balance transfers. The pandemic has forced many customers to move their money around in order for lower interest rates, promotional interest rates, etc., and so transfers like these have become much more common recently. A card that can accommodate that need will be a winner among pandemic-era customers.

In short, COVID-19 has had a far-reaching, perhaps permanent, effect on credit and how customers see it. Customers have become less concerned with the extravagance that some credit cards can provide and more interested in cards that can help tide them over until a new job arrives or the day-to-day challenges of living amid a pandemic subside. The financial brands and card lenders that can adapt to this shift will set themselves up for short- and long-term advantages over their competitors, and for the opportunity to provide a meaningful, difference-making experience for customers.

Want to learn more about how COVID-19 has perhaps forever changed financial services and what they mean to customers? Check out my recent article on how financial services can thrive, not just survive, during and after the pandemic here.

The post How COVID-19 Has and Will Impact Credit—Permanently appeared first on InMoment.

It is this fact that led InMoment experts to get curious about the effect rapidly changing workplace conditions was having on employees. In true InMoment fashion, we surveyed thousands of employees globally to find the answers. The results led us to three eye-opening trends that all organizations should keep in mind as they continue to evolve their practices to keep up with the changing environment.

Trend #1: Employees Are Missing Connection

Adjusting to a remote working environment poses many challenges—especially when it comes to staying connected to colleagues. You can no longer pop by someone’s desk to ask about their weekend, or convene in the kitchen for a debrief on last night’s episode of a popular show. Yes, you can shoot someone a quick online message, but it’s just not the same as in-person discussions.

It is not surprising, then, that our survey found only 30% of remote workers felt a connection with coworkers. This is compared to the 36% of those who worked remotely prior to the pandemic—indicating that even in the best of times, remote work poses some challenges to personal connections. And the connection levels vary by age: the cohort that felt the highest levels of connection were the 18-24 yr olds, whereas the 25-44 age cohort scored the lowest on connection. There could be many reasons for this, not the least of which being that many in the older age group are more accustomed to fostering connections in-person, given that is likely the way they have always done it.

With the challenges to connecting, plus the fact that we are socially distanced in our personal lives as well, it’s no wonder that “isolation” was the highest endorsed negative emotion in the study.

There is a key opportunity here for companies to do more to help their employees feel connected to their coworkers. At InMoment, our teams have started hosting virtual trivia nights, happy hours, and coffee breaks to foster that connection despite being at a distance. Another idea is to organize virtual activities, such as running scavenger hunts, baking challenges, or book clubs. Sometimes, it’s simply just starting a discussion with team members on a topic unrelated to work, such as what people have been watching or how people are connecting with friends and family. 

Trend #2: New Stressors Are Emerging

It’s no secret that integrating work and life pre-pandemic was already a struggle. Add in the lack of in-person schooling for kids,  the inability to disconnect on a vacation, or simply the added stress inherent in a global health scare, and your employees are buried in stress. Our research showed that across all industries, employees were feeling the pressure of finding more ways to balance their personal and professional lives. 

To help address these new stressors, it’s first important to acknowledge them. Encourage employees to share their concerns, and share your own. By listening to employees, you’ll understand each specific person’s situation better and be able to determine how best to address their challenges. Be flexible and willing to adapt, and your employees will appreciate the support—now and in the future. 

Trend #3: Fear, Anxiety, and Loneliness Are Looming

Perhaps surprisingly, our initial study found emotional sentiment to be fairly positive for our respondents. Given that our initial research was conducted when the pandemic was in the early stages and people were still adjusting to remote working conditions, it makes sense that there was a novel sense of acceptance, calm, and even optimism.

However, below the surface of those emotions were deep concerns, as indicated in the qualitative responses. More negative emotions could be emerging and develop to primary emotions as the pandemic continues. While these rankings were similar across all demographics and working conditions, it will be interesting to see how this evolves as time goes on. 

As leaders in an organization, you should keep these results in mind. While employees may at times seem positive and accepting, it’s important to still inquire regularly about their emotional well-being. It’s okay to allow employees to vent a little bit or share their concerns—in the long run, this will help you proactively address any issues or concerns. 

So What’s Next?

It’s important to note the findings summarized here are from earlier in the pandemic. Now, 5 months in, sentiment and feelings will likely have changed slightly. People may be getting used to their new working environments and schedules, and they may have new ways to connect with coworkers.

However, as we’ve seen, this pandemic continues to throw many of us for a loop. There are even bigger decisions to be made in the coming weeks and months, and it’s hard to know how new developments will impact us personally and professionally. Using this report to understand employees’ initial sentiment on how organizations are handling the pandemic provides a baseline and roadmap you can reference to move forward. 

It’s safe to assume stress and loneliness will continue to evolve. Employees need your support more than ever!

Are you looking for a way to assess your employees’ current situation, their feelings on the pandemic, and how your organization as a whole is coping? InMoment is offering a few different pro-bono survey solutions to help you understand your employees’ current needs—whether you are transitioning back into the office or remaining full-time remote. For more information, visit https://get.inmoment.com/inmoment-cares-na/. 

About the Study:

Over 2700 employees across 17 organizations participated in the remote worker survey. 61% of the respondents were new to working from home. 89% were from north america, with the majority (54%) in the 25-44 yr old age range. The population had a mix of individuals who were with their company for 10 or more years (23%), and new employees (<3yrs) represented 20%.

The post Three Research-Backed EX Trends for Your Evolving Workplace appeared first on InMoment.

Experience outcomes have a lot to do with all the usual elements, like brand professionalism, but they also have everything to do with how customers feel before, during, and after an experience. Companies can only do so much to manage customers’ feelings, of course, but that does include evaluating how those individuals feel as they share experiences and using that feedback to make meaningful changes.

Today we’re going to touch on four ways that companies can create more emotionally meaningful experiences:

• Identifying Customers’ Emotional State(s) of Mind
• Evaluating Emotions’ Impact on KPIs
• Shifting Customer Emotions
• Empowering Staff & Processes with New Intelligence

Method #1: Identifying Customers’ Emotional State(s) of Mind

As we mentioned, companies can’t control customers’ emotions, but they can gauge how those individuals feel before and after an experience. Whether it’s via a quick post-purchase survey, social media, or other listening tools, organizations can easily learn not just how their customers are feeling, but also how those feelings inform their decision to come to the brand for a specific need and what their impression is after the interaction.

This information is invaluable for meaningfully changing and/or improving experiences, and gives brands a real shot at better managing customers’ emotions as they interact with the organization. Of course, it should also mean a better experience for all parties involved.

Method #2: Evaluating Emotions’ Impact on KPIs

This one probably goes without saying, but it really can’t be understated how large an impact customer emotion has on KPIs. A customer who’s made to feel angry, for example, probably isn’t going to do wonders for a brand’s retention or cross-sell/upsell KPI. Brands should thus always view KPI improvement through the lens of customer emotion.

This topic connects heavily to the idea of meaningful experience improvement as well. The most transformational process changes can ripple through an entire organization from the bottom up—a better experience occurs, customers become happier, and all the best KPIs light up as a result of the positive emotions that experience improvement instills toward the brand.

Method #3: Shifting Customer Emotions

This point definitely forms a Venn diagram with our first method, but the idea of shifting customer emotions during an experience really deserves its own bullet. Brands shouldn’t restrict their emotional evals to seeing how customers feel before and after an experience—they should also evaluate what can be done to elicit positive emotions (and quash negative ones) in the midst of customer interactions with a brand.

This lens affords customer experience (CX) practitioners a chance to tweak experiences in truly meaningful ways and can be thanked for conventions such as, say, auto dealerships offering customers coffee while they wait for repairs. Likewise, every experience a brand provides should also be thoroughly evaluated for pain points, bottlenecks, and other broken touchpoints that risk upsetting customers. Brands that find and fix these areas will have shifted their customers’ emotions mid-experience, which is powerful.

Method #4: Empowering Staff & Processes with New Intelligence

To expand upon the point made at the end of the last section, knowing how customers feel only really means something if brands execute on those emotions. It also means that companies shouldn’t confine that execution to a CX or customer-facing team. In fact, why not share those learnings throughout the business? Even teams who work far from the frontlines usually have something to do with providing a great experience, and should thus be let in on new learnings.

Finally, as we already talked about, process fixes are a must once companies have learned how experiences make their customers feel. Besides, actual fixes are really the only way that brands can create emotionally moving experiences for their customers in the first place. Using these methods as an improvement taxonomy can help any brand actually reach that goal.

Click here to check out our full report on the importance of customer emotion created by longtime CX expert Simon Fraser.

The post Four Ways to Create Emotionally Moving Experiences for Your Customers appeared first on InMoment.

So, how can brands avoid breaking promises? Well, as I outline in my recent POV on this subject, one of the ways that companies can ensure that they consistently fulfill customer obligations is to create realistic brand promises in the first place. Here’s how brands can do that.

Know Your Customer

Brands should always evaluate the promises they make through a customer’s lens. That means knowing who their customers are, what they consider to be important, what they’re looking for in an experience, and why they come to you for it. This notion is sometimes referred to as the customer’s “moment of truth” and a brand has fulfilled a promise in their eyes when it delivers that moment consistently.

To many customers, the difference between failing to keep a promise and failing to deliver on a moment of truth is miniscule. In my aforementioned POV, I talk about how a colleague of mine experienced an especially brutal broken promise: an airline flight that didn’t uphold its promised anti-COVID safety measures. Not understanding the moments of truth is one thing; understanding and then failing to deliver can be a deal breaker. Additionally, depending on the severity of the problem, some customers will not give brands a second chance.

Delivering The Goods

Companies need to clearly understand what their customers want so they can both rise to the challenge and ensure that they deliver flawlessly on that desire. Brands can increase their likelihood to succeed by building a customer experience (CX) program as part of their business operation. A decent CX program can make brands aware of customers’ wants and needs—a great CX program unites customer, employee, and marketplace perspectives to give companies a continuous, 360-degree view of the experience(s) they provide.

This approach gives brands the opportunity to know what their customers value, so they can create grounded, realistic promises that can be delivered every time. If nothing else, it’s always better to underpromise and overdeliver than to overpromise and underdeliver.

Brands that take this tack will be positioned to create not just good promises for their customers, but the right promises. Companies that pick the right brand promises and deliver at the moments of truth create customer loyalty and a  stronger bottom line for themselves.

Want to learn more about the importance of creating and keeping effective brand promises? Take a look at my article on the subject here.

The post How to Craft Deliverable Brand Promises appeared first on InMoment.

We’ve listed the three most effective considerations that practitioners can use to anticipate and avoid unexpected experience program costs:

• Vendor Scalability
• Vendor Flexibility
• Nonparticipation Costs

Factor #1: Vendor Scalability

This tip may seem gratuitous, but program scalability actually isn’t considered as often as it should be, and brands can end up paying extra for that mistake. Practitioners can avoid a lot of headaches with their own teams, the C-suite, and the accounting department by selecting an experience partner that can scale programs from the very beginning.

This approach enables brands to select and begin a program that grows alongside both their CX accomplishments and aspirations. It also allows organizations to reduce operating costs from the very beginning, which can result in both a much healthier program and a CX budget that always stays in the black. CX practitioners can use this method to strive for an ambitious program while still avoiding unanticipated costs.

Factor #2: Vendor Flexibility

Though picking an experience partner and implementing its capabilities is no small task, the days of rigid, prepackaged experience programs are drawing to a close. This is great news for businesses because they can now work with vendors to create a versatile experience solution instead of attempting to wrap themselves around an unflinching list of features (many of which a given company may not actually need).

Solution flexibility enables CX practitioners to avoid unanticipated costs by paying only for what they need from a vendor. For example, would your brand benefit from an analytics team or does that capability already exist within your organization? What about a self-service approach versus full management from the vendor? Once practitioners consider these questions, they should select a partner that’s flexible enough to meet their needs without showering them in unneeded extras and—you guessed it—unnecessary costs.

Factor #3: Nonparticipation Costs

There’s another element to cost consideration that often goes, well, unconsidered when brands talk about implementing an experience program, and that’s what happens when companies don’t have such an initiative in place.

Feedback collection, experience improvement, and customer centricity are all more important now than ever before. These ideas are the means by which brands can both create a better experience for customers and use that capability to plant a flag at the top of their vertical. Therefore, brands should consider the very real opportunity cost of not collecting, analyzing, and implementing feedback. An experience program isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s non-negotiable for any company that wants to succeed.

Taken together, these three methods can empower brands and the experience practitioners who work for them to avoid unanticipated costs and keep their programs viable. They can then use their programs to achieve what we just talked about: a meaningfully improved experience for customers and thus a more commanding presence in their marketplace.

For more information on how to effectively pitch and prove the worth of CX programs to anyone and everyone, check out our new eBook on how you can make a business case to your CFO (or anyone else) here.

The post Three Factors That Help Experience Programs Avoid Unanticipated Costs appeared first on InMoment.

In fact, many financial services companies use their customer experience programs as a primary tool to influence key business outcomes. Looking for a few real life examples of how brands have done this? We’ve compiled a quick list of inspiring stories from our finserv clients. Check them out below: 

Use Case #1: Empowering Employees

A global senior wealth management firm was able to utilize its CX programs to gather information from up to 150,000 clients annually. The data was tied to client asset information, allowing all portal users to view the opportunities and risks by customer segment. Timely and integrated reports allowed different employee groups to utilize this information, proving that experience initiatives truly empower all employees regardless of where they fall in an organizational hierarchy. 

To get even more specific:

• Financial advisors were able to identify and save at-risk client relationships, pinpoint opportunities for growth and potential new business, and leverage both the survey process and their own results to market themselves to prospective clients.
• Field management was able to prioritize its coaching based on financial advisor survey results, manage key client relationships (in excess of $2 million dollars) at their branch, and foster peer coaching by pairing advisors with different strengths and weaknesses.
• Senior management was able to quantify the impact of customer satisfaction on revenue and profit, as well as identify key opportunities at the firm level to improve the client experience and grow relationships

Use Case #2: Preventing Churn

A global financial services firm used its CX solutions to identify customer segments that were most at risk. This effort helped the brand prioritize retention and inspired it to invest in strategies to reduce churn.

By focusing on the customer experience, the company achieved immediate intelligence that it was then able to deliver to the team members who could make a difference, accelerating current and future operations service enhancements. The brand was able to identify the key variables that most impacted loyalty for various customer segments, paving the way for initiatives to enhance the end customer’s service experience.

Use Case #3: Combining CX and EX

One retail financial services firm struggled to retain its members. With customer demand hot on the rise, this fast-growth firm found it difficult to listen and respond to those individuals, but with retention at stake, it got moving on its experience initiatives.

The firm launched more transaction-based listening programs to gather real-time customer feedback and serve as the collective core of its updated CX program. In addition, the brand launched employee feedback programs and a customer relationship survey that would both help it view overall customer health and cross-reference customer and employee perspectives.

This new program launched using greater mobile engagement, text analytics, and case management to close the loop. Within 18 months, the firm expanded the number of products/services per customer household by 16 percent, resulting in a 4 percent increase in loan share of wallet. The brand also increased its customer base by 31 percent and identified specific areas for improvement and expansion based on customer feedback. Wow!

There’s More Where That Came From!

Each of these use cases is incredibly inspiring, but the good news doesn’t stop there. In our latest eBook, we lay out four specific business goals that financial services brands can achieve with their experience programs. You can check it out for free on our Resources page, where you can also find a collection of customer stories that describe how industry leaders make a difference with their experience programs!

Click here to read “The Top 4 CX Business Goals for Financial Services Brands!”

The post At a Glance: Experience Program Use Cases for Financial Services Brands appeared first on InMoment.