Socialize Your Customer

Experience in 3 Steps

eBook

The World Is Social, and It

Belongs to Consumers
If there are any doubts about the influence consumers now have over a
brands success, all one needs to do is take a peek at social media and view
the conversations happening. Theyre not only getting louder, they are happening
far more frequentlythanks to the enabling technology of the day: smartphones.

Smartphone owners now spend as much phone time using social networking
apps, such as Twitter and Facebook, as they do playing games.

Smartphone Penetration 2014

57%

Canada

62%
USA

66%
UK

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Customers who want to share a great shopping experience (or perhaps have a
bone to pick) dont have to wait until they get home to voice their opinion over
the social wire. Instead, they just reach into their pocket or purse to tweet, post,
review, or like as they please.

The staff at this

store treat
us like family.

Consumers are quick to adopt technology that enables them to communicate

their experiences with their networks. Unfortunately, even with the
conversation rising on the tide of social tech, many brands still fail to respond.
InMoment has discovered that 46% of consumers dont believe brands are
acting on the feedback they provide.

The staff at this

store are loud
and obnoxious.

When brands stay out of the conversation, half the story goes missing, and they
lose out on trust, loyalty, instruction, and powerful incentive to succeed.

73%

Source:
InMoment
Consumer
Insights
Report

of shoppers
said Facebook
influenced a
recent store
visit

of consumers
have visited
a brands
website on a
mobile phone

37%

Users log
an avererage
of 77 minutes
per day using
apps on their
smartphone

77

Minutes
Source:
http://the
socialskinny.com

68%
of consumers
check out
companies on
social networking
sites before
buying

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

The Socialized Customer

Experience
Brands need to go beyond just viewing customer feedback
to actually collaborating with customers through surveys
and social media channels. The right socialized strategy will
also be a platform that fosters team collaboration within
stores to use shared best practices and knowledge to
deliver exceptional customer experiences at the front lines.
Socializing your customer experience takes a new way of
thinking about feedback to engage the consumer in active
brand co-creation rather than a one-way survey process.
Its the next stage in how retail brands can better connect
with their patronsinside and outside the walls and across
the silos of operations and marketing.
The key is to place attention on linking operational delivery
to the brand promise from marketing. The aim is to
explicitly and transparently drive behavioral alignment of
frontline service staff and store managers with customer
expectations of the brand. The goal is to engage shoppers
in a true dialog, not simply provide a listening post for
kudos and complaints. And by doing so, this loop can drive
meaningful operations and customer satisfaction gains.
There are three steps to transition your customer
experience strategy into its social phase, which we will
discuss in the following pages.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Make the Social

Transition in 3 Steps
1

Transform Beyond the Numbers

Delegate the Power

Join and Facilitate Conversation

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

77
65

82

1. Transform Beyond the Numbers

Go from chasing scores to changing behavior.
If the movie industry has taught us anything, its that success can only be as great as the
ambition driving it. Imagine a knight without a kingdom to save, or a parent without a child to
protect. Without the right aspirational goals, it is difficult to achieve anything meaningful.
When designing and implementing your Voice of Customer (VoC) program, remember this:
Scores and numbers alonewhile certainly usefuldont add up to a kingdom or a child
(theyre just not that aspirational). Meanwhile, the traditional survey, first introduced by market
research firms, was designed to generate precisely those things: numbers, metrics, and
benchmarks galore.
True, the information they deliver can be instructive, but its not transformative. You can
incrementally improve with customer feedback based on what your staff are doing and what
youve asked them to do. You can also harass your shoppers into telling you if employees are
sticking to the script, but you cant do anything transformative with this approach. Measuring
sticks cant play the important role that a social, story-based, Voice of Customer program can
in engaging customers and employees.
These old-style interrogation surveys may gather information from customers, but they are not
true customer surveys. To get real traction, you need to find other ways to audit your internal
processes and avoid troubling your customers with them. Instead, engage your customer on
what matters to them, both big and small: the things you do that are different and better than
anyone else in your industry. Find the intersection of what you do differently and what your
customers admire and love about your brand, and focus all of your energies there.
sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

How Do You Spur Changes

in Behavior?
As customer experience programs are elevated from
research studies to cultural change initiatives, the bar
is raised considerably on what they deliver. With staff
and team members critical to the customer experience,
it makes sense that a key to creating a better in-store
experience is to change staff behavior. So, how do you spur
(the right) changes in behavior?
Over the past decade of talking with multi-store retail
executives, area coaches, franchisees, and managers
across nearly a million locations around the world, weve
had a good look at what they do, how they spend their
time, and what the differences are between the most
successful locations and the ones that struggle. From these
experiences, the successful ones have consistently shown
us four themes:

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

1
2
3
4

They understand the unique opportunity each store has for improvement
and have clear objectives for each one. These objectives are communicated
effectively to the entire team, from managers to staff, giving everyone an
understanding of what they are working toward and why.

Each individual has concrete actions to take that are appropriate to their role.
Every associate has specific tasks they need to consider from a shoppers
perspective while performing their day-to-day tasks.

Not only are activities clearly outlined, they are linked back to objectives and
connected to customers in the minds of employees.

Finally, there is a focus on sustained execution. When successful, this is the

proof point of changed behavior.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

2. Delegate the Power

Move from centralized programs to distributed accountability across location managers and employees.
Today, command and control increasingly puts brands out of touch with customers and in danger of
missing the mark entirely with brand transformation (or the lack thereof). Significant achievements take
the involvement of a unified team, and cross-team empowerment is the great mediator between topdown strategy and bottom-up results.
A socialized customer experience takes what used to be an initiative driven exclusively by the C-suite
(customer loyalty) and transforms it into a practical set of tools to help all stakeholdersfrom regional
executives to store managers to floor staffdo their jobs better. By becoming a day-to-day tool for
work, not only does the impact of a Voice of Customer program become far greater, but it also provides
each stakeholder with a level of accountability that drives the brands success.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Equip Managers with Vision

of the Journey
The moment a customer sets foot into a store, the
elements of the overall brand promise start to come
together: the greeting, the atmosphere, the selection, and
more. This customer journey should be mapped out with a
clear understanding of each moment of truth, where the
brand can differentiate itself from others. Preparation and
training should revolve around the identified moments.
Oddly, understanding these critical touch points in the
customer journey is often overlooked in many customer
experience programs. In todays marketplace, successful
retail brands must work just as hard at creating a consistent
brand experience over time and across locations as they do
on score improvement.
Retailers must be 100% grounded on what an ideal
customer journey is for their brand accompanied by
the operational acumen to deliver on it 100% of the time
(or close to it).

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Provide Tools Focused on Action

First, focus your insights.
In the new era of Big Data, the paradox is that more data is not necessarily better. Not for store
managers anyway. Sending large quantities of unfocused customer feedback to location managers is a
losing strategy. They simply dont have the time to sift through massive amounts of data to evaluate and
identify areas for improvement in customer satisfaction. This reality drives InMoments Simple & Elegant
approach to reporting.
Managers need resources that enable them to quickly get to the highlights of their customer feedback
and then translate those insights into straightforward action plans. Furthermore, managers need action
plans that are matched to their stores specific problems. That means giving managers a tool that
presents focus areas for improvement in a simple, clear user interface.
To reinforce our earlier point, location managers must be served up reports that provide instant insights
on adapting both local customer experiences and brand-wide feedback improvement methods.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Share Knowledge
Across the Organization
Many location managers (especially when new to the business or the role) do not have the
experience to adjust the customer experience for accommodating specific insights uncovered
through feedback. To overcome these experience deficits, it is important for retail brands to
provide coaching by experienced location managers to less experienced ones, by sharing best
practice knowledge across the organization.
The knowledge-sharing capabilities offered in a socialized VoC program can provide several benefits.
Less experienced managers gain access to virtual knowledge centers and other resources that
work to fill gaps in their brand experience. Additionally, fostering this type of communication within
a brand helps to build the brands internal community. Regardless of the amount of experience,
all location managers ought to have the ability to turn customer feedback data into specific
improvement actions that can be shared as best practices brand-wide.
This crowdsourcing helps to ensure a consistent brand experience and to optimize the value of
customer feedback insights.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

3. Join and Facilitate

Conversation
Go from one-way speak to a real
conversation.
As mentioned earlier, surveys have a history of being
uninspiring, number-hungry interrogations. Thankfully,
they dont have to be (nor should they be). Survey fatigue
emerged from humanitys resistance to bad surveys, not
to all surveys. The social survey of todays top brands is
crafted as a conversation starter that engages instead
of exhausts. At InMoment, we help brands open up a
dialog on what matters to consumers and start a social
conversation. One thats frank, honest, instructive
and fits nicely into your work schedule.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Survey Length
Crafting a better survey involves a few key elements that can serve to minimize fatigue on the part of
a consumer. Survey length is one of those elements that can have a huge impact on drop-off rates. It
is critical that surveys only ask questions that are impactful to the results you want to achieve and are
relevant to the customers answering them!
Probably the best way to cut survey questions is also the simplest: Replace the majority of them with an
open field, where they can say whatever they want, guided only by the prompt Tell us what you liked
most and least about your experience. This only works well, however, if you are taking advantage of
modern text analyticslike the engines built into our InMoment Experience Hubto automatically read
and sort open text comments to surface root-cause insights.
With the right analytics and loyalty modeling services, even a short survey should help you to understand
the drivers of the drivers, that is, the nuanced elements of your brand experience that allow you to stand
out from the competition.

text
analytics
As a side note, consider the fact that you wont be the only one trying to start a conversation. Customers
now talk to brands over social media, email, text, and phone. You need to be ready to follow up on the
conversations you start, as well as the ones your customers do.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Make the Survey Fit

the Channel
When it comes to collecting survey responses, it is
important to allow your customers to use the feedback
methods they are most comfortable with. Support a large
range of media channels: desktop & mobile browsers,
toll-free Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and even
social applications.
Keep in mind that the media type will impact the survey
experience, if even slightly. So, make sure to adjust
structure, length, and question wording accordingly to
ensure customer feedback comes as conversation. The
ability to vary the set of questions, wording of questions
and answers, and the visual layout of surveys for different
channels allows each survey to deliver its own optimized
experience. Thankfully, intelligent and responsive survey
design from your program vendor can automatically make
these adjustments by detecting the channel in use.
Your customers may have different conversational
preferences on different days, and even a conventionally
short and engaging survey isnt short enough at certain
times. Beyond survey length, the relevance to the
respondent will determine when fatigue sets in. Respecting
this reality, you can give customers a choice by breaking a
survey into sections: a short set of essential core questions
and then an optional set to complete a more diagnostic list
of detailed questions. Again, its all about putting thought
up front into how to craft an effective survey.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

Get Credit for Delivering on

Your Promise
When youre putting a significant effort into connecting with your customers to better deliver your
brands promises, what happens if it starts working? How do you know if customers are beginning to
notice? How do you start getting credit for these efforts?
Weve been saying it this whole time: Go social. Use VoC-integrated social advocacy and online
review solutions as part of your customer experience program to help customers magnify the
things you do well over social networks and at review destinations. Customers are talking to each
other about what they like and dislike on sites like Facebook and Twitter; theyre rating your overall
experience on Yelp! and Google. Why not give them an easy way to recommend the elements of your
customer experience that they like best?
Online reviews are now heavily relied on by customers making a purchasing decision. Your brands
reputation is wrapped up in the ratings customers are giving you on social sites. Our studies show
that by simply encouraging and facilitating validated reviews from more of your customers, you
can improve online ratings and attract new clientele. Our own reputation improvement product,
OpenTell, has already begun transforming the online reputation of some of the biggest brands out
therethrough authentic, fraud-free reviews.
Happy customers have always been willing to recommend you to friends and family; social media
makes this simple act infinitely more powerful than its ever been. The result is that a good experience
can now impact thousands of people and the value of delivering a great experience goes far
beyond the walls of a single shop location. With our patented social advocacy solution, we improve
relationship marketing and generate social recommendations with a simple step tied directly to
positive survey responses.

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

So Whats the Bottom Line?

Customer experience optimization is evolving into a social experience for customers and brands alike.
In an always on world, retail brands must work hard to engage and interact with consumers. Its
critical to keep a finger on the pulse of their likes, dislikes, wants, and wishes.
As a consumer-facing company, the challenge is to respond to social consumers and change how
the company operates when consumers point out their disappointments. Suggestions can be a huge
opportunity to stand out in an increasingly competitive retail world.
In this new world, one thing is clear: Retail brands that continue to embrace new consumer behaviors
and develop new approaches to engaging with their brands will be the market leaders that forge
deeper connections and build active advocacy across all brand stakeholdersowners, employees,
and customers.
To learn more about engaging socially with your customers, visit www.inmoment.com

Program Goals

Traditional CX

Social CX with
InMoment

Measurement and reporting

Brand transformation
Experience Optimization

Program Focus

Customer Feedback

Tracking Scores

Driving behavioral change

Control from center

Sharing of best practices

Interrogation

Conversation

After the experience

During and after the experience

sales@inmoment.com | 1-800-530-4251 | Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc

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.

Contact Us
sales@inmoment.com
1-800-530-4251

Copyright 2014, InMoment, Inc