Named "One to Watch" in CRM magazine's Service Awards issue earlier this year, InMoment has made a number of key moves recently. The company, formerly known as Mindshare Technologies, acquired customer experience platform provider Empathica in 2013, and has since rebranded as InMoment. With roots in the Voice of the Customer technology and a newfound focus on holistic customer experience, InMoment now aims to deliver technology "optimized for contact centers," but able to "move beyond them," says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. InMoment's recent updates to its Customer Experience Hub speak to the company's commitment to expanding the reach of its solutions both geographically and functionally.
Thanks to the introduction of global text analytics capabilities, the Customer Experience Hub now supports over 90 languages. All of InMoment's multilingual feedback and reporting features have been extended to provide functionality across all of the languages, and now give end users—such as contact centers—scalable, real-time insight and analytics on customer feedback in different geographic regions. "Solutions for multiple languages are a must for companies with a global presence," John Sperry, CEO of InMoment, says.
One customer company is already reaping the rewards of a VoC solution that operates on a broader geographic scale. "Foot Locker Europe serves customers across 17 countries and four different banners, including Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, Runners Point and Sidestep," said Thomas Schmidl, director of operations at Foot Locker, in a statement. "Being able to listen to each customer in her or his own language is absolutely critical to understanding how they truly feel about their experiences with our brand and our services. Scores vary greatly between cultures. If we depend solely on numbers to understand our customers, we make poor decisions, and miss huge opportunities."
To ensure that customers better understand the breadth of data that comes in through VoC programs as well as through additional channels, InMoment has also launched its CX Analyst Tool. The solution will arm customers with an analytics capability that has all the brawn of a powerful legacy platform and the flexibility of new-age Big Data technology. The aim of the CX Analyst Tool is to bring together data collected through call center interactions, as well as chat, email, and other sources, with standard VoC programs to enable companies to see a fuller customer engagement profile and deliver not only immediate support but also start anticipating upcoming issues and plan ahead with predictive insights.
"This will be a great benefit to our call center clients, because they have a lot more data than many of the other industries we serve. They have so much data constantly coming in," Sperry says. "With the analyst tool, they'll be able to process and access data in real time. The solution can get down to the rep level and determine which changes to make on the fly to deliver a better customer experience [while the customer is on the phone]," he adds.
Increasingly, customer service teams are looking for solutions that deliver more comprehensive analytics, and InMoment is responding to the need, according to Wang. "We're seeing a number of clients explore how they can aggregate all the signals and interactions around a customer. The experience hub serves this purpose. What's required will be a good aggregation of context clues around roles, relationships, product and services, location, time, sentiment, and intent," he says.
While the company is headed in the right overall direction, analysts agree that InMoment should focus on other types of growth, not just geographic. The language expansion is "consistent with a small vendor going for continued organic growth," says Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of ThinkJar. But Kolsky adds that it will not be able to “move higher with a focus on new geographies [alone]. Focusing on new geographies takes a lot of work and effort and distracts from continuous growth.” Back in March, Kolsky said that InMoment should target more verticals, and he maintains that opinion.