February 8, 2017
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

InMoment Announces Explore

InMoment today launched Explore, a self-serve analytics tool that provides instant access to unstructured customer data to help companies derive actionable insights from customer comments. Moreover, Explore aims to assist companies in avoiding survey fatigue by enabling them to derive real-time insights from existing customer data. According to the vendor’s website, “the problem isn’t getting more data, because your customers are giving you feedback in the form of voice, video, social, and survey comments. The real problem is getting intelligent and actionable insights from that data.”

JD Nyland, executive vice president of product management at InMoment, says that the solution “leverages real-time text analytics to instantly search and sort unstructured customer comments for answers to questions without having to ask again.” When brands are seeking customer feedback, their “first instinct is to send a survey, or send lots of surveys,” Nyland says. “Today’s enterprise DIY survey tools make it incredibly simple, fast, and cost effective to do just that.”

But there’s peril in this approach. “When done well, asking customers for feedback can build relationships and improve business outcomes,” he says. “Over-surveying, on the other hand, can feel more like an interrogation than an honest inquiry, especially when customers have already addressed a brand’s questions in previous surveys.”

Explore aims to address this tendency by making it easier for companies to derive insight from the customer comments they already have. The solution scours various sources to find answers to question in real time and allows users to filter comments by topics such as products, services, employees, and competitors. “Explore can ingest customer comments from any source, including social posts, survey comments, voice and video comments, and more,” Nyland says. “Explore can analyze data collected by InMoment, as well as data collected by the client or other vendors.”

Customer comments are valuable to companies because unlike numerical evaluations, they provide a glimpse into consumers’ thought patterns, Nyland explains. “Customer feedback normally comes in two forms: scores or ratings, and comments. Other customer data—from digital or CRM systems, for example—includes the who, where, when, and how much. The missing element is the why, which lives in the unstructured comments,” he says. “Customer comments can tell you why your [Net Promoter Score] is a 57. They can tell you why an ad campaign crashed and burned. When brands understand the ‘why’ behind customer data, they know what to do next to either solve a problem or leverage an opportunity.”