InMoment announced several new features to its XI platform, extending its capabilities across several fronts. Dash Research spoke with InMoment’s chief product officer, Sandeep Garg, to gather insights into the announcement, as well as to discuss how CX will be able to support companies in the coming year as they may struggle with labor shortages and budget cuts.
XI Platform Enhancements
InMoment’s new list of capabilities makes it clear that the company is deepening its commitment to power its platform with AI technologies that can help companies gain efficiencies in their quest to quickly and easily gather, measure, analyze, prioritize, and provide action on customer feedback.
Intent Detection
Using advanced AI, built on functionality acquired through Lexalytics, a predictive AI, text analytics model that gives organizations the insights needed to identify what a customer intends to do next.
According to Garg, “It’s fairly easy these days to determine positive and negative sentiment, but what is hard to do, is determine intent. Getting to the root of what people are trying to do and what will they be doing next. Are they looking for information? To make a purchase? Contact support? This tool helps to bring light to that and also provide data to better understand particular market segments.”
Impact Predictor
This is a key driver analysis tool that allows teams to run multiple predictive simulations on drivers of performance to determine the impact a project will have on a business.
“This is going to be a powerful solution for CX practitioners in the coming year,” Garg says. “There are some actions that can be done to improve a situation, but companies can only implement so many. Our solution allows companies to try an action out. For instance, a retailer can look at the effect of putting more people at checkout. Maybe that will increase your satisfaction by 10%. But what happens if you keep the store open an hour longer? Maybe satisfaction increases 25%. This tool allows companies to determine what will have the biggest impact on CX metrics so that priorities can be determined and action taken.”
Frontline Coaching and Prioritization
This CX metric-based AI text analytics model uses text and visual signals to quickly the top five positive and negative impacts on business metrics (NPS, CSAT, OSAT, Sentiment scores) at the location level so businesses can prioritize high-impact areas for frontline improvement.
“Coaching is really a fast-growing space,” says Garg. “And having the ability to quickly find the trends in data allows topics to get flagged and become focused areas for training. The best coaching comes from customers. We have seen great applications of this in retail. If AI is able to pick up praise or criticism, and then you have 200 examples of praise and criticism this can help provide training to try to replicate or avoid certain actions and circumstances.”
Social and Reputation Management
Following the recent acquisition of ReviewTrackers, the XI application now supports SSO and API access to integrate social review data with Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback for a seamless side-by-side view of both structured and unstructured data. Organizations can better understand the competitive landscape and take immediate action to recover dissatisfied customers.
According to Garg, “Being able to support social and reputation management is table stakes. We feel fortunate we were able to acquire one of the best in the industry, ReviewTrackers. Integrated CX relies on collecting signals across all customer touchpoints along an entire customer journey and you need a technology that is smart and nimble.”
Having all signals and data coming into one platform is critical, and allows companies to see the highs and lows in a customer journey so companies can more intelligently determine where investments and process changes need to be made.
Additional XI Platform Enhancements
- Human-Assisted AI Tagging: Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Understanding (NLU), teams can assist AI by creating text tags that train machine learning models to identify emergent and brand-specific themes.
- Digital and Mobile App Integration: Organizations now can deliver native micro surveys in their mobile apps and view results alongside Google Play and Apple Store reviews in one connected reporting experience.
- Forty-one additional self-serve and language-specific capabilities enabled to build and deploy surveys within the XI Platform. These additional language capabilities allow global organizations location-specific intelligence for experience improvement initiatives.
CX During Times of Economic Turbulence Is Crucial
Garg feels very optimistic about CX’s place at the corporate table in this year of potential turbulence. “What we are seeing is that of course, CX technologies have many capabilities that can help with cost cutting. This is really elevating the status of CX internally and we are seeing CX staff being called into meetings with CEOs to provide updates,” says Garg.
“When times are challenging it is even more important to stay closer to your customers. Yes, from a practical standpoint we could very well be seeing lots of cuts this year and it will be very important to measure how companies are being impacted,” says Garg. “The influence of customer experience technology using artificial intelligence is spreading. Its contributions to automation and operational efficiencies alone are incredible. As an example, companies can be getting thousands of pieces of feedback coming in. Getting that help sorting and parsing the data if customer support is looking for signals that a customer is frustrated that can be separated out; if marketing is looking for which surveys might have a potential for cross or upselling opportunities that can be parsed; legal can be looking for risky comments that might have repercussions. Getting the data narrowed down and presented in a way that users can get to the ‘what’s most important here’ is going to be increasingly important this year.”
According to Garg, “The most important piece though, is not just the data, but the action taken with it. Companies need to make sure they are collecting focused feedback on the right issue. This can be done by giving nudges as people are sharing information about their experience. And then issues and problems need to be automated right then and there. Our platform has this capability, and it saves the customer time and the company money. We are seeing a lot of companies place more importance on this area.”
Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
