© 2016 InMoment, Inc.
Today, there are thousands of brands, products, and prices customers have
immediately available at their fingertips. As a result, customer experience
is the new “competitive battlefield” where organizations can differentiate
themselves from the competition. The days of brands dictating the terms
are in the past. The balance of power has shifted, and many companies are
viewing this change with a sense of trepidation.
Instead of fearing the new paradigm, organizations can—and should—
embrace the change. It’s simple to say customers are more demanding.
Technology connects us and gives individual customers a louder, more
resonant voice than ever before. Some turn to this global megaphone
to vent their frustrations and even anger. However, the large majority of
customers simply want a different kind of relationship with the brands they
depend on. They want to be part of a conversation about how to improve
their experience. And if you listen well, their wisdom can enhance virtually
every area of your business.
T H E C H A N G I N G S T A T E O F C U S T O M E R R E L A T I O N S H I P S
How You Listen MattersA Practical Guide to an Effective Listening Program
By Brennan Wilkie, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy
W H I T E P A P E R
As organizations have begun to understand
these changes, one of the first instincts is
to ask questions. Lots of them. Interactive
Voice Response (IVR), online surveys, and
mobile apps allow brands to fire nearly
unlimited, non-stop queries at customers.
This onslaught is taking a toll. A Google
search of the term “survey fatigue” nets
more than 22 million mentions. According
to Pew Research, survey response rates
have declined steadily—and significantly—
over the past 10 years.1
While customers are becoming more
resistant to responding to traditional,
longform surveys, they are sharing more
details about their experiences with brands
than ever before—but in fundamentally
different ways. Online reviews are a good
example of this shift. The first online
A Shift in the Conversationreviews appeared in 1999. By 2000,
there were more than one million posts
recounting customer experiences. Today, 44
percent of consumers regularly write online
reviews, with Tripadvisor alone hosting
more than 225 million detailed stories.2
If brands want to understand and improve
the experiences they deliver to customers,
they’ve got to take a new approach to
eliciting all types of customer feedback.
From the questions you ask, to when and
how you ask them—how you listen matters.
It affects the quantity and quality of the
data. It impacts the value of the insights.
How you approach your customers when
asking for their perspective has a strong
effect on that relationship.
1 Collecting Survey Data. http://www.pewresearch.org/
methodology/u-s-survey-research/collecting-survey-
data/#the-problem-of-declining-response-rates
2 YouGov.com
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Missing the MarkNot too long ago, our CEO had a personal
experience that perfectly illustrates the
challenge brands face in balancing the
desire for data with the need to focus
on the customer. He purchased a new
vehicle and a few weeks later, received
a 500-question survey in the mail. (No
exaggeration. It really was 500 questions.)
The survey asked everything from how
many doors the car had to how friendly
the salesperson was. Being in the business
of customer feedback, he felt it was his
professional duty to answer each and
every question.
This survey missed the mark for a variety
of reasons. Five hundred answers is a
lot to ask. Plus, considering the Vehicle
Identification Number (VIN) was printed on
the front of the survey form, the answers
to many of the questions were things the
manufacturer already knew.
Upon completing the survey, he realized
that although he’d responded to
every category and subcategory, the
manufacturer didn’t understand the most
essential “why” behind his purchase—and
really, with most purchases. While we all
justify an investment of this magnitude
with our heads (e.g. plenty of room for
the family, performs well in the weather,
reasonable gas mileage, etc.), most
purchase decisions are made based on
emotion. This interrogation never even got
close to that side of the equation.
To be fair, that may not have been the
brand’s purpose. This approach is fine for
market research conducted in small doses
with willing (usually paid) audiences. But
as a go-to tool to better understand the
essential “whys” behind your customers’
experiences on an ongoing basis, it’s a
terrible tool. While cargo space and a great
sound system might have been factors in
our CEO’s decision, the most important
factor in why he bought the car was
because of the way it makes him feel when
he drives it. In this and many surveys, there
was no room for the customer to share this
essential part of the story.
While this a very personal example, it does
illustrate the larger shift that’s underway.
Customer experience isn’t about setting
up listening posts to hear what you want
to hear; it’s about creating an environment
where your customers can share what’s
most important to them—in the ways and
places they prefer.
To help illustrate the importance of this
concept, let’s take a look at a quick analogy
we all understand: personal relationships.
We’ve all experienced the often-awkward
dance of beginning a new relationship.
At times it’s incredibly easy. You start
talking to someone, and you feel an instant
connection. Other times, maintaining a
conversation is like pulling teeth.
Imagine, however, that you are interested
and want to take the next step. The
cardinal rule for creating a more substantial
relationship is being more interested in
what the other person has to say than what
you want to say. You don’t monopolize
the conversation. You would find out
everything you could about the person
you’re interested in and think of ways to ask
insightful, interesting questions.
Listening Up [lis-uh-n ing uhp] verb phrase Intentional, active, and strategic way to listen with true purpose in mind—not just hearing what a person is saying but understanding the meaning.
A People-Centric Approach: Listening Up
L E S S I N T E R R O G A T I O N , M O R E L I S T E N I N G
Collecting customer feedback in a way that protects the integrity of the
data while honoring the feedback process as a critical part of the brand-
consumer relationship is a fine line to walk. Err too far on the side of data,
and you can alienate the customer. Err too far on the side of the customer,
and you may get data that’s not very helpful. This tension clearly illustrates
the importance of being thoughtful in how, where, and when you listen. It
can make a huge difference in the richness and quality of your data. Better
data means better insights.
This “plan of attack” for building a
relationship is the same foundation you’d
use to interact with your customers, or
what we like to call “Listening Up.”
1. Know your customer
2. Understand their journeys
3. Ask your customers thoughtful
questions
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Building an effective listening program is crucial when attempting to improve the customer experience. However, it is just one part of a much larger undertaking that involves technology, best practices, and organizational change. For more information about what it takes to achieve the full range of benefits from your customer experience initiative, refer to CX: The Art of the Possible.
Taking a customer-centric approach
to listening requires a combination of
experience, subject matter expertise,
and the right technologies. Over the last
14 years, InMoment has worked closely
with brands across dozens of industries,
geographies, and at various levels of
customer experience maturity. In this paper,
we outline a series of best practices we’ve
developed in conjunction with some of our
expert partners on how to craft an effective
customer-centric listening program. These
best practices include the following:
• Understanding what the
business needs
• Understanding how the
business works
• Asking the right questions
• Asking the right way
• Asking in the right places
• Asking at the right times
A Note on Customer Journeys
Your customers are interacting with your
brand in more and different ways—from
research and exploration online, to word-of-
mouth, visiting a physical location, making
a first purchase, onboarding, calling into a
contact center, and many more. All journeys
are not created equal. Some have a much
greater impact on customer satisfaction
and loyalty than others. Perceptions of how
you’re delivering on customer experience at
the various “touchpoints” along the way, as
well as external influencers like competitors
and word-of-mouth from trusted sources,
create the full customer experience.
Some organizations have created complex
visualizations of entire journey ecosystems,
while others have a rudimentary
understanding of the routes and detours
customers take when interacting with their
brand. There are still many companies that
haven’t participated in a formal journey
mapping exercise at all.
The difficulty brands experience
with journey mapping is completely
understandable because it’s a cross-
functional exercise that can surface flaws
in processes, people, or systems that can
lead to feelings of inadequacy and/or
discouragement. However, understanding
what the customer is going through as they
interact with your brand—as well as how
important that interaction is to them—is
critical to establishing a successful listening
program and worth the growing pains it
often causes.
When beginning your journey mapping
quest, you should consider mapping
two customer journeys: 1) your current
customer journey and 2) your ideal
customer journey.
First, fight the temptation to make your
current journeys look good. Strive to make
them as realistic as possible. The more
realistic you are, the more quickly you will
be able to fix what the customer perceives
as broken.
A listening program created in a vacuum
cannot succeed. Before thinking about
the questions you’ll ask—through which
channel you’ll ask them or when—you
need to clearly identify your business
objectives and how they connect to your
CX initiatives, and which metrics drive the
outcomes you want. Many brands miss
this essential step, making it difficult, if not
impossible, to connect customer listening
and experience to quantifiable and
positive outcomes.
Step 1: Conduct a discovery exercise
through executive interviews. Openly seek
to understand what the functional groups
are working on and how they are supposed
to contribute to the larger corporate
objectives. This will inform a balanced view
of the customer experience opportunity,
and help you to determine whether
leadership is aligned on the vision, goals,
and needs of the program.
Step 2: Review previous consumer
research. Every organization has it, and it
can be an invaluable tool for understanding
how your brand is currently positioned
The second exercise is mapping the ideal
customer journey. What would a perfect
customer experience look like for your
company? How does it compare to the
current customer experience? Mapping the
ideal experience will help you identify gaps
in the current experience and help you
determine a strategy that will guide your
company closer to fulfilling your
brand promise.
You should also be aware that there is a
spectrum of complexity when mapping
these journeys. From a simple two-step
illustration all the way to intricate drawings
and mappings thousands of pages long.
There are many factors that need to be
considered when choosing the level that is
right for your company including industry,
complexity, scale, and volume. The most
important step, however, is mapping.
Understand What the Business Needswith your customers and what’s working.
Again, different functional groups use and
interpret consumer research differently.
Look across those groups to identify the
customer experience “so what?” moment.
Step 3: Listen to your employees. There
was a time when brands had personal
relationships with most, if not all, of their
customers. With growing populations, a
global economy, and layers of technology
between brands and their customers, this
type of connection is rare today. The good
news is that most companies still rely on
person-to-person interactions at some
level. One key to harnessing the insights
from those interactions is relatively simple:
ask your employees. Most companies
survey employees about their own jobs. But
they stop there. Asking for their thoughts
on what’s working well for your customers,
what’s not (and why) will give you an
incredibly valuable perspective and give
a very different type of ownership in the
customer experience.
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The second step of creating a customer-
centric listening program is understanding
how your program fits within the larger
scope of your business. It’s hard to create
an effective program if you don’t know
the obstacles and opportunities your inner
workings offer and, more importantly,
how they impact the way your customers
interact with your brand.
In addition to interviewing executives,
engage with the people who work
with your customers on a daily basis:
franchisees, managers, and frontline
employees. Also include the people in
marketing and ecommerce who oversee the
digital portions of the customer journey.
Don’t assume you already know what your
customer experience looks and feels like.
Actually take the time to walk a mile in your
customers’ shoes and challenge yourself to
Step 4: Review historical performance.
This may seem obvious, but you would
be amazed how rarely brands look in the
mirror and ask themselves uncomfortable
questions. If you have a listening program
in place, has it been effective? Where have
you had positive results (surfaced the
kinds of insights you need to drive positive
business outcomes) and where could you
improve? What’s worked and what hasn’t?
Knowing where you’ve been will help you
understand where you need to go.
Step 5: Evaluate your brand promise in
the context of customer experience. Your
brand’s value proposition may have been
defined before the formal discipline of
customer experience was formed. In other
cases, a brand promise is created from more
of a marketing perspective without much
thought about how or whether it’s executed
at the customer level. Because customer
experience is the vehicle through which you
deliver on your brand promise, now is the
time to bring them into alignment. Today,
your customer experience must be the
manifestation of your brand promise.
Understand How the Business Workssee, hear, and feel the experience the way
they do. And while you do that, make sure
you take the following steps:
• Retrace the customer’s steps through
the entire journey, including in-person,
online, on the phone, pre-purchase,
during purchase, and after the fact
• Use the product/service you’re selling
• Take a call in the contact center
• Talk to frontline employees and ask
for their feedback on the customer
experience (this is called Voice of
Employee). What would they change?
What do customers really love? Do they
have a new idea?
• Give feedback yourself
Walk in your customers’ shoes
Congratulations! You now know what
you’re trying to achieve as a brand with
your listening program. You understand
how executives define “success,” how
your business works, the pathways your
customers travel, and how it feels to make
the journey. You’re now ready to begin the
actual design of your listening program.
There’s a lot of talk about shortening
surveys as a way to boost response rates,
but simply abbreviating the number of
questions won’t help you get the most
insightful feedback. The same way you
wouldn’t go into an open conversation
with a long list of rigid questions, you
should also avoid that in your listening
program. True conversations ebb and flow,
The key to a successful program is
to always advocate for the customer.
Challenge the status quo. Don’t accept
that the way things are are the way they
must always be. Question everything. Don’t
just ask, “What is happening?” Identify
those legs of the journey that really have
an impact, imagine what should happen
at those points. Sometimes it’s a matter
of eliminating barriers; other times it’s
achieving over-the-top delight.
This process will help you determine
what about the experience is designed
versus what is improvised. It will help
you determine what is a competitive
differentiator versus what is table stakes.
Setting these baseline factors will give you
a strong foundation upon which you can
build an effective listening program.
Ask the Right Questionsnaturally moving from one topic to the
next. Building in flexibility to your surveys
is vital to hearing what matters most to
customers. The ideal scenario is knowing
your customer and where they are on
their journey, thoughtfully designing both
questions and listening posts, and having
the right technology tools to execute. Even
if you’re missing parts of the ideal equation,
you can make huge strides toward better
listening by simply being more purposeful.
Be careful not to abuse the trust your customers have extended to you via their personal information. On one hand, it is wise to use the data to to ask more insightful questions. On the other hand, customers can feel like you know them a little too well. Be judicious when using data to formulate where and what you ask.
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Know Your Customers
Every good listening program starts with
asking the right questions. And often, what
you don’t ask is just as important as what
you do ask. It’s critical that you know as
much about your customer as possible
before asking them for feedback.
The days of anonymous feedback are
waning. Companies can and should know
a lot about their customers. For example,
take grocery store loyalty cards, which
provide value in the way of discounts
to customers and allow stores to gather
both one-time and ongoing data at the
individual level. Using these data points, the
store can begin to predict other attributes
with a very high degree of accuracy such
as a customer’s gender, general health,
how many people are in the household,
etc. This information can be utilized in a
variety of ways, from customizing feedback
interactions to personalizing marketing
messages and offers.
In an ideal, customer-centric world, brands
would never ask a question to which they
should already know the answer. Going
back to our story about the new car, the
manufacturer already knew which car our
CEO had purchased, which model it was,
and which features it included. Had the
listening program been executed in a more
customer-friendly fashion, our CEO wouldn’t
have had to waste time answering questions
about the number of doors and cylinders.
It’s not just a matter of being nice. Keeping
surveys streamlined and focused on what’s
most important to customers increases
completion rates and delivers healthier
data sets.
Follow Survey Design Best Practices
Survey design is both an art and a science.
The type, order, and frequency of questions
significantly impacts the quality of data
you get in return. The number of topics
alone you can cover with your customers is
staggering; however, there are three pieces
of vital information that can act as a good
starting point.
1. How is your competition doing?
Knowing the metrics of your
competition in relation to your own
brand’s performance is critical, but
it is one of the most widely missed
measures of a corporate listening
program. Knowing where you are
strong and where you are weak will
provide necessary data when you
lay out your strategy to achieve a
successful customer experience.
2. How are you doing?
These questions are usually
quantitative, asking: likelihood to
recommend, customer satisfaction,
customer effort, and more. These
measures give you a baseline for
performance and almost all
companies include them in their
listening programs.
3. What’s important to your customers?
This is one of the more common
questions that companies overlook
when designing their surveys. Brands
need to know what a customer deems
important to improve the customer
experience, otherwise your actions may
be based on false assumptions.
Ensure that the value exchange is fair. Ensure that your customers believe that they are receiving more than they are giving up in sharing with you. Ask tough questions of yourself and your peers, putting yourselves in your customers’ place. Use common sense and err on the side of caution.
Once you know the topics you need to address, the next step is designing a
process that carefully guides the customer through a brief, friendly feedback
experience based on their individual interaction.
1. Order: Following a structured order ensures you get the most critical
information while leaving secondary, less important data as an option.
introductionoverall
experience
Survey code or detailsDate time stamp
Core Section
Opt-In Section
Overall satisfactionLikely to recommend
GoRecommendTM Customer WOWCustomer Rescue
Sweepstakes informationO�er redemption code
New productBrand attributesDemographics
Active ListeningTM
OpenTellTM
Examples:team • product • atmosphere
socialadvocacy
recognition & rescue
customercomment
key drivers
surveycompletion
point
customeropt-in
questions
surveyconclusion
2. Components: A good feedback experience generally consists of two
sections: a core and an opt-in. The core section is where you place questions
that apply to the most critical customer experience elements—the ones
tied to business drivers that need to be measured consistently across the
organization. The opt-in section is designed to be complementary to the
core. Here you would explore feedback that is supportive to your CX goals
and/or that will be analyzed in aggregate, thereby requiring a less frequent
or smaller sample. A modular design prioritizes your content and gives some
control to the respondent, which increases engagement.
Using branching logic is a good way to acquire insight on a number of questions
without overburdening any single customer. Branching logic serves up questions
based on the answer to the previous question. A good example of this is in the
grocery environment mentioned above. Branching logic can be deployed to
trigger off a particular rating. This can be done with both structured data (scores
and ratings) and unstructured data (open-ended comments). For example, if a
[email protected] • 1-800-530-4251 • © 2016 InMoment, Inc. 11
customer rated their experience a 1 out of 10, the next question might be: “We’re
sorry your experience did not live up to your expectations. Would you like a
manager to contact you to help resolve your concern?”
A completely different use case might be inside an open-ended comment
box with unstructured data. Let’s say a customer mentions your new product,
ChocoMagic Cereal, favorably. Your marketing department has recently
invested a lot of resources into launching the new cereal, and they want to
know how customers are hearing about it.
Branching logic combined with text analytics can associate the name of the
cereal mentioned with positive sentiment, and trigger a follow-up question
asking where the customer heard about it (e.g. TV, online, radio, grocery
store ads, etc). Your R&D team is also involved and wants to know about
the taste, so a question can be triggered to delve into that area as well. This
methodology allows you to dig into any topic and is based on how customers
are responding, keeping the experience relevant and focused. The other
added benefit to this approach is that you can track each particular branch
individually as well as explore other potential areas of change. This creates a
living survey that changes with time as customer experiences shift.
3. Content: The content of a survey is based on answer scale type (e.g., NPS or
five-point agreement scale), scale direction, specific wording, and phrasing.
Take the time to define the question set that is proven to be predictive of
the outcomes you want. You need to know what those are so that you can
defend the integrity of your survey as a strategic business tool.
Asking the right questions is the first
step. Asking the right way comes next.
Traditional surveys, like the one from the
car dealership, were long and laborious.
Customers today want customized
interactions, not long, templated
interrogations. Keep in mind that feedback
is another experience along the customer
journey. If you were to ask your customers
to give you feedback on the feedback
experience, what would they say? As with
all journeys with your brand, this process
can—and should—enrich, not detract from
the overall relationship between you and
your customers.
Starting in 2014, InMoment began
conducting an annual study on CX
Trends for the coming year. We ask both
customers and the brands that serve
them what’s most important when it
comes to customer experience. Customers
consistently rank “shorter surveys” and “less
asking, more listening” as priorities when
asked to share their experience.
Shorter surveys can help with response
rates. However, simply abbreviating the
number of questions isn’t the answer.
One approach is logically categorizing
your questions into smaller groups and
providing boundaries for the number of
questions you ask. Business guidelines such
as never having a survey with more than
five questions are a good rules. You can
still get insights on 100 questions if you
feel they are important. You may be able to
accomplish this same feat using only
20 five-question surveys instead,
minimizing the negative impact on
the customer experience.
Ask the Right WayIn addition to the length of the survey, be
aware of how many times you ask each
customer for their feedback. Even when
questions are personalized and short, too
many can still lead to frustration. Survey
fatigue comes in many different forms. You
are not the only brand looking to gather
their feedback. The ideal rate is up for
debate, but at the very least, measure your
response rates, keep an eye on waning
participation, and ensure your systems
can execute your desired volume. A good
rule of thumb is to send as few surveys as
possible to achieve statistical significance.
Back to the CX Trends study, not only
do customers want fewer questions,
they’ve asked brands to ask less and listen
more. Quantitative data derived from
structured survey questions are critical in
benchmarking, tracking key drivers, and
ensuring departments are executing on
Key Performance Indicators. Structured
questions will always have a place in
customer feedback.
Special Care: The golden rule of feedback is don’t make a bad experience worse. Often when customers indicate they’ve had a poor experience, automatic triggers fire off a barrage of additional questions all in the name of getting to the bottom of the problem. When a customer has a bad experience, brands need to take special care to create an empathetic environment where customers feel heard and taken care of.
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A survey designed with only quantitative
questions is like the Tin Man in The Wizard
of Oz—there’s simply no heart. Quantitative
data can tell you what’s happening, but
it can never reveal the why. The other
unavoidable shortcoming in structured
questions is that they only ask and answer
questions you’ve prioritized. You may want
to know detailed information about wait
time or pricing, but what your customer
wants to tell you is that the installation
process was so painful, they’re leaving your
brand and strongly advising their associates
to choose another vendor.
Mediums like voice, video, social, as well as
traditional comment boxes with interactive
prompting capabilities, give customers a
way to share their experiences in more of a
natural, narrative fashion. They often reveal
information you didn’t think to ask about.
They can surface the “unknown unknowns”
of your business—the plethora of issues
with products, services, and policies that
impact the experience.
Every customer experiences your brand in
different ways. As discussed earlier, there
are defined journeys, like onboarding,
which offers your brand an opportunity to
understand the customer at that specific
time. Distinct moments within a journey are
called touchpoints. Evaluate each journey
and touchpoint to understand how you
should associate a feedback request. This
ensures your interactions remain relevant.
As we’ve already discussed, the number
of ways customers talk to and about
your brand has rapidly expanded. Where
surveys were once king, there are now a
myriad of places to listen. These channels
include: contact centers that incorporate
live chat; website help sections; traditional
call centers; social media platforms like
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram,
and Snapchat; blogs and forums; online
communities; and review sites. The list goes
on and it can easily become overwhelming.
The key is choosing the channels that
appeal to your customers, and give them
several choices. When it comes down to it,
the best feedback channel is the channel
the customer prefers. In many cases, your
brand may already capture your customer’s
communications preferences. If not, your
customer is indicating their preference by
Ask in the Right PlacesWhen designing a listening program, many
brands try to tackle too much. They try to
understand the entire experience at once,
instead of evaluating the individual parts,
or journeys. What generally happens is that
they get bogged down and end up stalling.
Approaching CX in a more targeted way,
prioritizing the high-value journeys first
leads to better experiences for customers
and often a more direct financial impact
for you.
Listening Channelswhich channel they predominantly use to
communicate with your brand. For example,
if your customer is using your app, ask for
feedback within the app. If your customer is
using your website, ask for feedback within
the site. In this case, common sense is the
best approach.
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For each request for feedback, you have
a variety of different options regarding
what type of listening post to deploy. For
example, if a customer calls the contact
center to ask about a billing issue, at the
close of the call, the agent can extend a
personal invitation to give feedback about
that interaction, and then transfer the
customer to an automated system.
Because of today’s omnichannel world,
choosing the correct touchpoints to listen
in on—or not—can be challenging. You want
to get the information you need without
The final piece of asking timely and
appropriate questions is ensuring that what
you ask is relevant to both the channel and
the touchpoint. It makes no sense to ask
questions about the web experience via the
contact center. This seems like common
sense, but you’d be surprised at how many
brands struggle in this area. In the quest
for more feedback, they often overlook
the common sense rules of engagement. If
you’re on the web, ask questions about the
web experience. If the customer interacts
with you in a brick-and-mortar location,
confine your questions to that experience.
It’s as simple as that.
Listening Postsover-surveying your customers. You must
be eager and patient at the same time.
Our best recommendation is to respect
that the experience should unfold at the
customer’s pace, and then let that happen.
Gather feedback in a way that prioritizes
the most critical parts of the experience,
and find other ways to gather insights
about the less essential areas. Combine
different types of research methods. Offer
meaningful incentives that reinforce your
brand promise, and let customers know you
value their partnership.
Relevant Questions
Another building block of an effective
listening program is determining when
you want to have a conversation with your
customers. There are many times you
can—and should—ask for feedback from
both customers and employees. Here are
the two most common methods to request
feedback from a customer: event
and relationship.
1. Relationship: At defined intervals. About
the overall relationship (annual surveys).
2. Event: At the end of a defined event.
Focused on a specific event (after a
purchase; completion of
onboarding, etc.).
Relationship Feedback
Relationship-based feedback measures your
customers’ overall sentiment with your brand
in its entirety. It is composed to find out how
your customer feels about every interaction
with your brand. Generally, the same question
is asked over multiple timeframes to measure
your effectiveness at increasing customer
experience and driving loyalty. It’s also a
great measure for internally benchmarking
across time.
A major pitfall to avoid is to mix the two
types of questions in a single survey. If you
are measuring overall relationship, then only
ask relationship questions. For example, if
you ask, “How likely are you to recommend
Company A?” don’t add transactional
questions in the survey such as, “Based on
your recent visit to Store B, how satisfied are
you with your experience?”
Ask at the Right TimeRelationship surveys should only measure
holistic relationships at a given point in time.
This will certainly be impacted by events, but
combining the two may add bias toward the
most recent event.
Event/Transaction Feedback
Event-based questions determine customer
sentiment shortly after the customer has
had a touchpoint interaction, such as a call
to customer care, a visit to their local store,
or after purchasing a product (think back to
the customer journey mapping above). They
are often referred to as “listening posts” or
“triggered questions” and are specific to a
particular event.
Event-based surveys should also focus on
a single event and not attempt to measure
another event in the same survey. It is
always safest to measure one item at a time,
eliminating the possibility of introducing bias.
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One caution on event-based surveys:
they usually end up looking like an
intradepartmental report card, which is
okay. Event-based feedback is very effective
at providing data for intradepartmental
improvement strategies. That said, if used
strictly for that purpose, it may hinder holistic
improvement. The feedback channel and
reporting should be designed to ensure
that the insights can also be used across
departments. For example, a survey that
measures the purchase of a cell phone in
a retail environment may ask questions
about the representative that helped them,
the cleanliness of the store, if their phone
choice was in stock, etc. In most cases it can
quickly become a guide to store operations
efficacy and treated exclusively as such. It is
true that the root causes can help the Store
Operations department improve and should
be used for that purpose, but keep in mind
as you are crafting the survey that more can
be learned about other areas through the
transaction of purchasing a phone.
Event-based questions are extremely
effective at targeting root causes across
departmental silos as long as the program
designer understands this and accounts
for it so root-cause data is collected and
disseminated throughout the organization.
Theoretically, if you took the combinations
of all the transactions your brand has with
a customer, you could then statistically
calculate that customer’s relationship score.
This would be ideal because you could
completely understand the impacts to your
relationships and adjust your transactions
accordingly to achieve a perfect customer
experience. The problem with that theory,
in reality, is that it is impossible to measure
every interaction with your brand. Most
companies assume that impossibility and
settle too far to the other extreme. They
measure major events, but never understand
customer sentiment on the larger customer
journey. They overcompensate and end up
measuring too little.
Take an example of a cable TV company. The
company asks their customers their opinions
on customer care, onboarding, repair, and
retail transactions. These are an excellent
start to understand customer experience,
but the majority of the experience is the
actual product they deliver. Does their cable
work consistently? Are there outages? How
satisfied are they with the programming? The
questions go on. If the cable TV company
and the retailer do not become enlightened
on the major customer experience that does
not require a transaction, they will miss a
huge opportunity for more powerful and
lasting improvement.
Health Check Feedback
Many brands stop at those two methods.
In doing so, you can miss a lot more of
the customer’s story. There’s a third, less-
used but crucial time to listen to customer
sentiment: when you are not looking. Or
what we call, Health Check Feedback. These
types of surveys serve as check-in between
transactions to ensure the experience with
said transacted stuff (i.e. the product/service
you bought) is going well. For example,
30 days after you get your new cable box
installed, the cable company checks back
into see how you are enjoying—or not
enjoying—your service. This type of feedback
request honors the fact that a large part of
the overall customer experience is made
during the in-between moments.
In addition to three listening times detailed
above, there are other times you can—
and should—tune into both customer and
employee feedback to get all of the feedback
perspectives on your customer experience.
The following table explains the role of
each one:
Who What
All target customers
Active customers
Active and dormant customers
Active customers and non/partial purchasers
Active customers
Target customers, active customers, dormant customers
-
Benchmarking
Designated, high-impact journeys
General customer sentiment at key moments of truth
Post-sale/-service to understand discrete experience
Between transactions to understand user experience
Focus groups, ethnographic,user acceptance, etc.
-
Brand
Episode/Journey
Relationship
Interaction/Transaction
Health
In-Depth, Ad Hoc
Voice of Employee (VoE)
Brand
Episode/Journey
Relationship
Interaction/Transaction
Health
In-Depth, Ad Hoc
Voice of Employee (VoE)
Customers
Who What
-
Active employees
Active, seasonal, anddormant employees
-
-
Active employees
Active employees
-
Designated, high-impact journeys
General customer sentiment at key moments of truth
-
-
Standing or ad hoc employee groups serve advisory role on employee experience
Employee perspective on customer experience delivery
Employees
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I T ’ S A C O N V E R S A T I O N . D O N ’ T M O N O P O L I Z E I T .
At the end of the day, we’re back where
we started: how you listen matters.
Customers want to have a conversation. A
conversation with your customers should
be no different than any other healthy
conversation—driven by empathy and a
desire to deepen the relationship.
While these can be difficult concepts to
master, don’t use that as an excuse to
avoid listening up. Be curious, so you can
understand your customers better than
your competition. Do the hard work to
understand different customer touchpoints.
Genuinely enjoy the open conversations
with your customer, and be thoughtful with
the questions you ask.
Honor the feedback experience as the
important touchpoint in the customer
experience that it is. As much as possible,
be engaged. Keep things moving and
interesting. Don’t talk about yourself. This
is the foundation for an effective customer
listening program.
If you make it simple for the customer to
say what he or she wants to say—not just
what you want to hear—you’ll find yourself
building long-lasting relationships that
result in better loyalty and better
business outcomes.
About InMoment InMoment is a cloud-based customer experience (CX) optimization platform that gives companies the ability
to listen to and engage with their customers to improve business results through better experiences. Through
its Experience Hub™, InMoment provides Voice of Customer (VoC), Social Reviews & Advocacy, and Employee
Engagement technology, as well as strategic guidance and tactical instruction, support, and services, to 350
brands across 25 industries in 128 countries. The company is the leading VoC vendor for the food services, retail,
and contact center industries, with deep domain expertise in B2B, healthcare, hospitality, and numerous others.