Mindshare, Empathica United as InMoment to Tell Customer Stories Simply and Elegantly

Lonnie Mayne, President of Mindshare Technologies, couldn’t hold back his enthusiasm about Empathica, which it acquired last fall, and the decision that became official today: To bring the two companies together under a new name:  InMoment.

Officials for Mindshare Technologies, announced that the two companies have united under the new corporate entity and mission. With more than 300 employees throughout North America and Europe, serving 350 brands across 25 industries in 128 countries, InMoment is a cloud-based customer experience optimization platform that offers clients a level of innovation, expertise, and culture that is truly unique among customer experience vendors.

“The commitment to the customer is increasing and there is a relentless focus on that among companies and a hunger for tools and solutions to help them capture the stories of their customers,” Mayne told Loyalty360. “We really took a

Text Box: To bring the two companies together under a new name:  InMoment.

 look at our company and asked how we can help clients take that path and go farther. What is it that we’re doing that’s different from everybody else? We discovered what customers really want is their stories to be told.”

Text Box: “The commitment to the customer is increasing and there is a relentless focus on that among companies and a hunger for tools and solutions to help them capture the stories of their customers.”

As these “omni-consumers” browse websites, talk to contact centers, visit stores, receive SMS coupons, and fill out online questionnaires, they create “experience data,” Mayne said, and deep within that data lies the stories that carry invaluable insights that can literally make or break a company.  

The key word surrounding the rebranded company known as InMoment is bold, Mayne said.

“We expect our platform to be bold,” Mayne explained. “We expect our services to be bold. We want to optimize the customer experience. Can we emotionally engage with our clients and create a platform and services to emotionally engage with their customers?”

In what Mayne refers to as a “transformational” piece to the customer engagement/experience puzzle is the Experience Hub.

According to Mayne, the Experience Hub unlocks the full potential of this customer information and requires both a fundamental shift in perspective, as well as best-of-breed technologies. The InMoment Experience Hub centralizes experience data−regardless of source

Text Box: “We discovered what customers really want is their stories to be told.”

 or format−and connects it with technology to reveal critical customer stories, and then channels timely, actionable insights to the right people and places to drive targeted decisions across the entire enterprise.  

“This platform captures that customer experience data, regardless of where it comes from, in a simple and elegant way, and presents these stories to the clients so they can act on it,” Mayne said. “We love what Empathica has been doing. They have a fantastic global presence and a similar mindset, with the right balance of technology and services.”

Mayne said the company realized that “we had two fantastic brands, and a potential that transcended both of us.”

Enter InMoment.

“We want to take clients and customers farther,” he said. “As we were bringing the companies together, we had the chance to ask our customers and ourselves some important questions.  We wondered if we were just a survey company? What were we doing to really bring this information to life? When we started talking to clients about the opportunities we saw, they got really excited. We talked about the fact that no one person or department can really own a customer, or their experiences. But we can all own our individual moments. InMoment became the brand that represented that realization. And once we started sharing the name and sentiment behind it with our clients, it resonated. They began using vernacular like ‘being in the moment” immediately.”

The Experience Hub is critical to InMoment, Mayne said.

“We have focused on the Experience Hub,” he said. “Giving our clients tools to help them own each moment with their customers. To do this, we are focusing on the experiential aspect of that data; the stories. The places where brands get beyond the ‘what,’ and begin to really understand the ‘why’ in customers’ behavior, and the relationships brands have with them. This realization catapulted us forward.”

Text analytics is another huge component of the platform, Mayne said.

“We can tell more about customers from unstructured data than we ever could from a structured data perspective,” he said. “Structured data, surveys, that’s great information and it won’t completely go away. But you’re only learning about what you’re asking, and there’s so much more.”

Text Box: “Companies are not starved for data, they’re starved for that deeper understanding that helps them know what to do with data.”Mayne said that research shows about 80% of data coming into companies is unstructured.

“Companies are not starved for data, they’re starved for that deeper understanding that helps them know what to do with data,” Mayne said. “Our platform is about speeding up the ability to respond and react to customers. Text analytics adds an incredible amount of richness to the stories being told. It really is transformational. We’re taking this program further at every level, from services, to products, to the people we hire. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo.”

Here are the key features of the InMoment Experience Hub:

·      Data Agnostic: Experience data is collected and stored in a variety of ways and places, from transactional and demographic information in CRM systems, to surveys conducted by third parties, to social media comments on the web. Over the years, InMoment has gathered more than 350 million customer surveys; 85 million last year alone, and even more expected in 2014.  And while InMoment will continue to innovate the way it collects data for clients, the Hub will also leverage partnerships and APIs to bring in and utilize experience data from other sources.

·      Highly-tuned Text Analytics: Once the data is centralized, the Experience Hub applies sophisticated text analytics technologies to the information to glean insights. Built on IBM’s Watson Natural Language Processing architecture, InMoment has spent years developing additional layers of proprietary technologies to fine-tune its text analytics capabilities to specific industries. InMoment takes the additional step of calibrating the technology to individual client needs. The result: companies receive significantly more insights, and a deeper understanding of true customer sentiment.

·      Fast, Simple, Elegant: Once critical customer stories are collected and surfaced, the Experience Hub harnesses InMoment’s suite of products and services to channel actionable insights to the right people and places within an organization in a timely manner.  Insights are packaged, and presented in a “simple, elegant” format to ensure even the most junior manager can understand and use  the information to address problems, reinforce positive behaviors, identify trends, spot vendor issues, and more.  

InMoment delivers a full range of products and services, including Voice of Customer (VoC), Social Reviews and Advocacy, Employee Engagement, Support, and Consulting. Its clients include: AMF Bowling Centers, Arby’s Restaurant Group, Boots, Bridgestone Retail Operations,  Brinker International (Chili’s), Debenhams Department Stores, Express, Halfords Autocentres, Melting Pot, Pizza Hut, Smashburger,  Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust,  Total Wine & More, Waitrose, Wright Express (WEX), and Yo! Sushi.

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