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2025 Consumer Experience Trends

Download our report to learn about the trends reshaping CX!

Customer Experience

A Cheat Sheet for Mapping Out Your Brand’s Customer Journey

One of the most important elements of a customer experience (CX) program is a customer journey map. These maps serve as visual guides to the interactions customers have with your brand, including product purchases, talking to employees, and more. Customer journey maps can help brands hammer out the steps customers take on the road to a better experience and, just as importantly, do so from the customer’s perspective.

Today, we’re going to walk you through how to quickly create an effective customer journey map that touches on elements like key evaluation points, positive and negative experience components, and more. Let’s jump in.

A Certain Point of View

Though a customer journey map focuses heavily on seeing your brand’s experience through customers’ eyes, it actually starts with a different perspective: yours. The first step to building an effective customer journey map is considering that journey as your organization sees it. 

First, identify the key interactions that customers have with your brand. Are these interactions limited to one-step transactions, or are they a bit more involved? The answer to this question varies from company to company—it’ll even vary between the different stakeholders that you bring in to help just at your brand. This can make creating a shared framework a more involved process, but brands can’t build a truthful, effective customer journey map without it!

The Next Level

Once you, your team, and stakeholders from other departments have agreed upon your customers’ steps, it’s time to expand on every step by identifying some key elements. These elements include: the customer’s desired outcome; time or duration; attitudes and thoughts; emotional responses and needs; customer pain points; strong and weak areas; and the importance of and satisfaction with the step.

At first glance, hammering these details out for every step in your customer journey map may seem a bit overkill. However, similarly to getting everyone’s opinion on what those steps actually are, doing this legwork enables a more educated approach to your customer journey map. This, in turn, will give your brand a greater understanding of its experience, the strengths and weaknesses of that experience, and what you can do to meaningfully improve it.

Bridging The Divide

Now that we’ve talked about building out the customer journey and the elements of its every step from your brand’s point of view, it’s time to circle back to what we talked about up top: understanding the journey as your customer sees it. Starting with your brand’s perspective on the customer journey is important because it gives you a perspective to compare and contrast to your customers’.

The Value of Understanding the Customer Journey

In short, a customer journey map encourages brands to consider what makes their experience great while also giving them a means of seeing why customers may (or may not) agree. Brands then have a better chance of knowing how to bridge potential divides and work toward a more connective, meaningfully improved experience for customers, employees, and the organization itself.

Want to read more about uncovering the real customer journey? Check out our eBook on the subject here, where we break down the process in five simple steps!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

What Retail Customers Are Saying About Black Friday in 2020

We’ve all seen videos of customers flooding through retailer doors in the small hours of Black Friday. While many of us are still asleep on the day after Thanksgiving, these shoppers are getting their Holiday shopping started with doorbuster deals—but what about this year? Will those shoppers still be rushing to stores? Or will the concerns of COVID-19 encourage them to stay home and snag deals from their laptops?

Not the type to leave anything up to guesswork, our Strategic Insights Team asked 5,000 future holiday shoppers how they expect to spend their Black Friday. Here’s what they learned:

Most Customers Will Do Their Holiday Shopping in November

One of the questions our team asked customers was when they planned to do their holiday shopping. More specifically, in which month did customers expect to begin their holiday shopping? More than half (54%) responded that they would start shopping in November.

Here are some other important results to note:

  • 42% of respondents are planning to make purchases on Black Friday (in store)
  • 39% plan to purchase on Cyber Monday (online)
  • 19% plan to make purchases before Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Most Customers Will Shop the Same Ways They Did in 2019

Because 2020 is a year unlike any other, our experts wanted to know if customers would shop more, less, or about the same this year.

In a somewhat surprising twist, respondents noted that they were even more likely to shop on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday in comparison to last year. They are also more likely to save shopping until December.

Black Friday or Cyber Monday?

One of the biggest questions retailers have on their minds is whether customers be participating more in Black Friday sales or Cyber Monday specials?

Well, many retailers have expanded their online sales to be more of a Cyber Week, with the full week of Thanksgiving offering opportunities for customers to save on holiday gifts. And it’s a good thing, because the majority of shoppers say that they will be shopping both in store and online.

No matter where customers are this Black Friday, there’s no doubt that they will be grateful for the brands that prioritize their safety!

For more details about our findings on in-store versus online holiday shopping, check out this infographic! We outline:

  • How many shoppers will be in stores and online
  • What customers are saying about their experiences
  • What matters most to them in both places.

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

3 Powerful Ways to Create Engaging Transactional Customer Surveys

Few elements of customer engagement matter more than well-designed transactional customer surveys. You need feedback from your customers and they deserve a chance to provide it. And a well-designed survey can help everyone achieve these respective goals. With that in mind, we’re going to take you through a few principles that can turn any survey from a questionnaire to a conversation. Let’s get after it.

  • Key #1: Design With The End in Mind
  • Key #2: Keep It Short
  • Key #3: Invitations are Everything

Key #1: Design With The End in Mind

A lot of brands out there believe that the best way to get information from their customers is to throw a bunch of questions at the wall and see which ones stick. That strategy may get you some intel, but it’s nowhere near as effective as designing with the end in mind. This strategy is all about considering what you actually plan to do with the info you want to collect.

For example, do you want to better understand why retention is looking a bit down this quarter? Maybe it’s time to assess how well your employees and locations adhere to company standards? Whatever business goal you have in mind, designing your surveys around specific objectives will make them far more useful to you and your customers. You can gather information vital to accomplishing your goals, and customers can alert you to problems and process breakages that a more general survey wouldn’t have picked up.

Key #2: Keep It Short

One of the reasons customers either abandon surveys halfway through or outright ignore them is because they’re too long. The funny thing is that a lot of brands don’t mean for surveys to become long-winded. They usually start out short, but slowly accrue too many questions from other stakeholders over time.

A good rule of thumb for any transactional survey is that it should take no longer than five minutes to complete. That limit is important to bear in mind as you decide which questions to include and which to cut. Additionally, save ratings-based questions for the most important parts of the experience.

Finally, consider what data you may already have from other systems and listening posts. If you’re asking questions related to those areas, consider cutting those questions out.

Key #3: Invitations Are Everything

Creating an enticing invitation is one of the most overlooked parts of survey design. Recipients pay a lot of attention to how well invitations are designed and factor that into accepting whatever it’s for. Thus, it’s never a bad idea to put some time into making your survey link or invitation look good. Whether it’s a beautiful design or a funny one-liner, think about what your customers might appreciate seeing in a survey invite and act accordingly.

The Benefits of Transactional Customer Surveys

Keeping these three principles in mind can supercharge any brand’s survey design and create a noticeable uptick in customer responses. Armed with that new intelligence, brands can be more aware than ever of their strengths, their weaknesses, and how to go about both of these elements to create a peerless experience for their customers.

Click here to learn more about survey design best practices from expert Dave Ensing.

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Tons of CX Data? Here’s How to Make Sense of It

If there’s anything organizations aren’t hurting for these days, it’s CX data. Brands may have been avidly searching for it once upon a time, but nowadays, they face the opposite dilemma: having more data than they might know what to do with. This is particularly true for experience program data—a few listening posts here and there can quickly inundate even larger organizations with a ton of customer intel.

Today, I’m going to talk you through how to make sense of your data. Using the tips below will help you isolate signals, cut through all the white noise, and ultimately leave your organization more CX savvy.

All Data, No Decisions

Having a lot of data is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it is more challenging for brands to make data-driven business decisions when they’re not sure where to start. Should companies dive directly into customer feedback? What about employee surveys and financial metrics? The sheer amount of disparate data sources at play within most companies can make gleaning actionable intelligence feel overwhelming (if not flat-out impossible).

The first step toward overcoming this challenge is to take all of your data and pour it into one place. This includes customer feedback, employee intel, financial data, operational data, and other sources. Why? Because siloing data makes understanding your customers and their experiences much more difficult because it obscures the context needed to fully understand both of these business problems. Putting all your data together will help your company not only contextualize what is broken, but also illuminate the path toward solving those challenges.

Finding The “Why”

Desiloing data gives companies the chance to holistically understand their customers’ perceptions and experiences. This is important not just for making data-driven decisions, but also understanding the root of broken or underwhelming experiences. When brands connect experience data with financial and operational information, it becomes much easier to see where things might be going wrong and how badly.

Once brands gain this holistic view, it’s time to dive deeper with key driver analysis. This doesn’t mean sit back and watch your NPS—it means rolling up your sleeves and getting into exploratory analysis and customer profiling. These processes allow companies to learn exactly why their customers behave the way they do. Even more, they identify what experience strengths and weaknesses drive that behavior.

Don’t forget to ask your employees for their experience feedback as well! A lot of brands mistakenly overlook this step because the employee and customer experiences drive one another. There’s no better way to make an employee feel valued than to ask for their feedback. Moreover, it encourages employees to feel involved in and take ownership of customer experience.

The Next Step

Brands can make sense of their experience data by desiloing it, analyzing it within the context of additional data, and hearing employees’ side of the story. These are the first steps toward becoming a more data-driven (and customer-centric) organization, an endeavor that can make any company a leader in its vertical.

Click here to read my full article on the importance of understanding customers to transform your brand. I take a deeper dive and provide additional tips on how to revolutionize your brand through the power of Experience Improvement (XI).

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

How 3 Brands Are Actively Improving Customer Experiences

Be honest: what do you think of when you hear someone is “managing” something? Is a person performing a task well if they are just “managing” it? Or are they barely keeping their heads above water? That’s why at Pearl-Plaza, we have done away with simple experience management and have fully embraced Experience Improvement (XI)!

The truth is, simply managing experiences isn’t enough. You need the right combination of valuable data, effective technology, and human expertise. Not only that, but you need to understand where and how you can take action to actually improve your experience—and your bottom line.

Curious what Experience Improvement looks like? Here are three brands who have it down to a science:

Foot Locker

Techtronic Industries (TTI)

Allianz

Interested in Improving Customer Experiences?

Improving customer experiences is why Pearl-Plaza was created. Learn more about our approach here!

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The Doctor is (Virtually) In: COVID and Telemedicine Experience

Many patients—especially those at high risk—prefer virtual visits and consultations with their doctors. As a result, there’s been a sharp uptick in telemedicine over the course of this year amid COVID.

I recently talked about COVID-19’s effects on hospital visits and how the pandemic has reshaped patients’ healthcare facility expectations. But this isn’t the only experience arena that the Coronavirus is impacting.

Many patients—especially those at high risk—prefer virtual visits and consultations with their doctors. As a result, there’s been a sharp uptick in telemedicine over the course of this year.

Of course, just like hospitals themselves, virtual consultations face new experience challenges amid COVID. Therefore, healthcare brands must address those challenges directly in order to build trust with their patients. Those challenges, and their solutions, are the focus of this article.

Consultation Considerations

The telemedicine experience is dramatically different from a walk-in visit, especially when it comes to collecting feedback. A virtual visit presents more immediate opportunities to collect feedback from patients, though this poses a new challenge: healthcare brands need to avoid inundating patients with countless questions.

The best approach for hospitals and providers to take here is to provide feedback opportunities at the beginning and end of virtual visits. This gives patients an opportunity to voice their expectations at the start of the consultation and follow up on how well those expectations were met. This one-two strategy strikes a careful balance between survey frequency and patient comfort (which is obviously key to building a great experience for them).

Telemedicine Experience Checkup 

It’s important to remember that anyone who submits feedback expects brands to act on it. This is especially true for hospitals, which means it’s vital that healthcare brands parse through virtual visit feedback carefully. An experience platform that can ingest and analyze feedback, especially unstructured data, is key to this end. Hospitals can succeed by considering their audiences, designing their listening programs around those audiences, then executing an action plan.

Taking action on patient feedback is especially important these days. Healthcare customers have always expected providers to act on their concerns, but the pandemic has sent that expectation into the stratosphere. Thus, patients are paying especially close attention to their virtual visits—and how hospitals respond.

To recap, hospitals can ensure that their patients are receiving the best telemedicine possible by:

  1. Designing their listening program around tangible goals and important audiences
  2. Listening carefully to those audiences
  3. Ingesting feedback, especially unstructured data, to heighten patient understanding
  4. Applying subsequent learnings to the wider organization
  5. Achieving a better virtual experience for patients

Healthcare providers that stick to this strategy will not only make it out the other side of this pandemic, but also do so in a far better position for themselves and the patients for whom they provide quality care.

To learn more about the lasting effects of Coronavirus on the patient experience, check out this full article by Jason Macedonia here.

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

What Holiday Shoppers Expect In Store & Online

Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?
Holiday Shopping at a Mall

Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?

If you’re unsure, don’t simply guess what your customers are looking for. Instead, check out this infographic we created based on a study we did that surveyed 5,000 North American customers about their expectations for the holiday shopping season!

What Holiday Shoppers Expect In Store & Online

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

How COVID-19 Has Impacted Patients’ Hospital Perceptions

The Coronavirus pandemic has altered patients’ perceptions of everything about hospitals, including how they move through the facility and interact with its employees.

The Coronavirus has upended patient experience (PX) as we know it, infusing the world of hospitals and healthcare brands with just as much (if not more) uncertainty than that currently facing restaurants, brick-and-mortar storefronts, and other types of businesses. More specifically, the pandemic has altered patients’ perceptions of everything about hospitals, including how they move through the facility and interact with its employees.

Today, we’re going to quickly review how exactly COVID-19 has impacted patients’ hospital perceptions. We’ll also review what healthcare brands can do to accommodate and overcome the challenges associated with these changes, especially as the virus’s spread continues to accelerate.

Keeping Things Clean

COVID-19 has put patients on high alert when it comes to hospital and healthcare facility cleanliness. Hospital hygiene has always been important to most patients, of course (especially those who were already anxious about doctors’ appointments), but even healthcare customers who are usually more relaxed are now closely scrutinizing hospitals’ adherence to cleanliness guidelines. How well healthcare brands stick to those guidelines may very well determine whether they make it out the other side of this crisis.

Because of this acute awareness, hospitals and clinics must not only adhere to the most stringent cleanliness guidelines and CDC guidance, but also make that dedication visible for all patients to see. This means that hospital staff must continually (and visually) reassure patience that hygiene is being taken seriously. Signage, protocol reminders, and other visual cues are vital to maintaining patients’ trust in their healthcare experience and that their facility is ensuring safety in the age of COVID.

Beyond Clean Surfaces

Healthcare customers’ heightened scrutiny of cleanliness goes beyond wiping down counters and doorknobs (though that’s certainly important as well). COVID-19 concerns run much deeper than that—many patients are now paying much greater attention to their every physical move in a hospital. Whether it’s entering the facility, moving through it toward a doctor’s office, or picking up a prescription, healthcare customers are paying close attention to how their movements within hospitals may present any sort of COVID-19 risk.

Hospitals and other healthcare facilities must respond to this acute concern for physical wellbeing the same way they do concerns over cleanliness: aggressive visual cues. As I mentioned earlier, signage and other visual reminders are a huge help here, but the next step is for staff to physically carry out cleanliness measures in front of customers. This approach has been adopted by every business from restaurants to grocery stores over the course of the pandemic, and it’s a proven tactic for reassuring customers that your healthcare brand is taking COVID-19 seriously.

Continuous Assurance

One of the biggest challenges with measures like these is making sure that employees are continuously carrying them out. Many of these strategies, especially carrying out facility hygiene in front of employees, can’t just be set and forgotten. Hospitals must take care to keep these strategies going and keep them highly visible. Perhaps more importantly, they must use PX listening programs to tune into their customers’ safety concerns and how those concerns evolve over time. This tactic empowers hospitals to continuously demonstrate their commitment to patient safety, achieve meaningful improvement, and be in a much stronger position than the competition when this pandemic finally ends.

Click here to read my full Point of View article on how COVID-19 has forever changed patient experience. I take a deeper dive into the pandemic’s full effects on patient experience and how healthcare brands can respond in these unprecedented times.

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

Text Analytics Terms You Need to Know

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started in the world of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), you need to be fluent in the language of text analytics.

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting started in the world of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), you need to be fluent in the language of text analytics.

However, that’s more easily said than done. With technology evolving so quickly, it’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest. That’s why we’ve put together this quick text analytics glossary. Check it out below!

Top Terms

Accuracy: The combination of precision and recall for a given tag or model. 

Emotion: A measure of positive/negative feelings. Must be strong and clear-cut enough to be categorized as a specific emotion.

Human Translation: This translation method has a human translate each comment individually as the customer submits it.

Intent: Intent identifies what the customer is trying to achieve based on their response.

Keyword: A word or term that occurs in unstructured customer feedback data.

Machine Translation: Translation done by a machine that has been trained by humans.

Native Language Model: A text analytics model that is purposely built for a specific spoken language.

Natural Language Processing: A field of computer science and artificial intelligence that draws intelligence from unstructured data.

Precision: Correctness; represents how often a given concept is correctly captured by a specific tag. 

Recall: Coverage; refers to how thoroughly the topics or ideas within a given tag are captured. 

Sentiment: The expressed feeling or attitude behind a customer’s feedback. Categorized as positive, negative, or neutral.

Sentiment Phrase: Also referred to as a Sentiment Bearing Phrase or SBP. A phrase or sentence identified with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.

Sentiment Score: A measure for both the polarity and intensity of the sentiment within a given comment.

Tag: A label generated from text analytics that groups together similar customer comments around a specific concept or topic.

Text Analytics: The methods and processes used for obtaining insights from unstructured data.

Text Analytics Model: A natural language processing engine that uses tags to label and organize unstructured data.

Theme: A dynamically extracted concept from a collection of comments, generated by an unsupervised machine learning algorithm.

Unstructured Data: Qualitative data or information that is not organized according to an easily recognizable structure. Can include comments, social data, images, or audio recordings

Making the Difference with Text Analytics

We hope this quick glossary helped you on your journey to find the best solution for your business. After all, text analytics make the difference between getting a meaningless score from your data and getting actionable intelligence. And without that intelligence, you can’t make experience improvements in the moments that matter. That’s why it’s so important to get your text analytics right!

If you want to learn more about world-class text analytics solutions, including new approaches like custom layered models and adaptive sentiment engines, you can check out our full eBook on the subject here!

Watch the Video – See Pearl-Plaza in Action

Check out a quick demo video to learn more about how our solutions can help your team grow your business.

The Shortcomings of Comment-Based Surveys

Comment-based surveys can be effective for immediately gathering feedback from customers. However, there are several arenas in which brands use comment-based surveys when another survey type would yield better intelligence.

Comment-based surveys can be effective for immediately gathering feedback from customers. And when it comes to customer experience (CX), timeliness can make or break an organization’s ability to act on that feedback.

However, there are several arenas in which brands use comment-based surveys when another survey type would yield better intelligence. Today, I’d like to dive into several shortcomings that can make using comment-based surveys challenging for brands, as well as a few potential solutions for those challenges. Let’s get started.

Outlet-Level Analysis

As I discussed in my recent article on this subject, comment-based surveys are often less effective than other survey types for conducting outlet-level analysis. In other words, while brands can see how well stores, bank branches, and the like are performing generally, they usually can’t determine where individual outlets need to improve .

The reason for this has as much to do with the feedback customers leave as the survey design itself. From what I’ve seen across decades of research, customers rarely discuss more than 1-2 topics in their comments. Yes, customers may touch upon many topics as a group, but rarely are most or even a lot of those topics covered by singular comments.

What all of this ultimately means for brands using comment-based surveys to gauge outlet effectiveness is that the feedback they receive is almost always spread thin. The intelligence customers submit via this route can potentially cover many performance categories, but there’s usually not that much depth to it, making it difficult for brands to identify the deep-rooted problems or process breakages that they need to address at the unit level if they want to improve experiences.

(Un)helpful Feedback

Another reason that brands can only glean so much from comment-based surveys at the outlet level is that, much of the time, customers only provide superficial comments like:“good job”, “it was terrible”, and the immortally useless “no comment.” In other words, comment-based surveys can be where specificity goes to die.

Obviously, there’s not a whole lot that the team(s) running a brand’s experience improvement program can do with information that vague. Comments like these contain no helpful observations about what went right (or wrong) with the experience that the customer is referring to. The only solution to this problem is for brands to be more direct with their surveys and ask for feedback on one process or another directly.

How to Improve Comment-Based Surveys

These shortcomings are among the biggest reasons brands should be careful about trying to use comment-based surveys to diagnose processes, identify employee coaching opportunities, and seeing how well outlets are adhering to organization-wide policies and procedures. However, none of this means that comment-based surveys should be abandoned. In fact, there’s a solution to these surveys’ relative lack of specificity.

Brands can encourage their customers to provide better intelligence via multimedia feedback. Options like video and image feedback enable customers to express themselves in their own terms while also giving organizations much more to work with than comment-based surveys can typically yield. Multimedia feedback can thus better allow brands to see how their regional outlets are performing, diagnose processes, and provide a meaningfully improved experience for their customers.

Click here to read my Point of View article on comment-based surveys. I take a deeper dive into when they’re effective, when they’re not, and how to use them to achieve transformational success.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

What Customers Say the 2020 Holiday Retail Season Will Look Like with COVID-19

Summer has passed, school is back in session, and Halloween is just around the corner. You know what typically comes up next: the holiday shopping season.

The only thing is that 2020 is anything but typical. There were very few summer road trips, kids are wearing masks or taking classes from home, and trick-or-treating might be off the menu to limit COVID-19 spread. So what can retailers expect—if anything—from the holiday shopping season?

Well, at Pearl-Plaza, we believe that asking customers is the best way to understand their expectations and perceptions, so our Strategic Insights Team is here with the answers!

In this study, we asked over 5,000 North American customers all about the 2020 holiday shopping season, including:

  • When they will shop
  • What they will be shopping for
  • Whether they will be shopping in store or online
  • If they expect to attend Black Friday doorbusters
  • And more!

How Will the State of the Pandemic Affect Shoppers Feelings and Habits?

If it’s one lesson we’ve learned so far this year, it’s that we need to expect the unexpected. When many of us started working from home at Pearl-Plaza in March, we never imagined that we wouldn’t be able to work in the office for months. Customers know this, but they are still feeling optimistic that circumstances with the pandemic will improve in the next few months according to our research.

In the unstructured data accompanying these questions, customers went into their feelings in more detail:

  • “I don’t think it will get better until 2021…but that will not stop my [upcoming holiday shopping].”
  • “I think things will remain the same for a while…we just have to get used to this [new normal].”

Though we all hope that we will see improvement in the next few months, we have to face the reality that there is a possibility COVID-19 will be with us through the new year. With that in mind, we asked how this possibility would affect likelihood to switch from in-store shopping to online.

In this case, customers were especially wary of their personal safety and health if the pandemic is still among us in the holidays, with the majority (65%) stating they are more likely to shop online. Still, 35% said they would still shop in stores; these customers described:

  • “I think [brands] are doing enough right now to make sure I’m safe when in their stores.”
  • “As long as the [COVID measures] are still in place, I will be going to the stores.”

It should definitely give retail brands a boost to know that they are making their customers feel safe, and that the in-store experience is so important in the eyes of their customers. 

Looking Forward

Preparation is key, especially in such a busy season. But add in a global pandemic and being prepared seems to be almost impossible. 

However, if retailers are armed with information directly about their customers about what they will do in the event that the pandemic worsens, whether they’ll be shopping in store or online, and more, they will know where they need to dedicate their time and resources to succeed. 

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

Wootric ranks #1 in ROI in Experience Management | G2 Grid Report

Note: Wootic was acquired by Pearl-Plaza in January 2021. The Wootric product lives on as our Professional Plan.

Wootric, the CX management platform for maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV), has been recognized as a High Performer in the G2 Crowd Grid Report for Experience Management for Fall 2020 and Winter 2021. Wootric also outperforms the category on all satisfaction measures including ease of use.

Notably, Wootric, which seeks to drive business outcomes from customer experience efforts, has the fastest payback in the category.

Wootric is ranked #1 in ROI (Return on Investment)

“Companies should expect a financial outcome for their investment in CX,” said Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer of Wootric, “Our turnkey approach means that our customers quickly understand user sentiment at the moments that matter, and analytics surface ways to immediately improve retention and engagement.  It is gratifying to see our customers’ success reflected in our ranking.”  In the G2 report, Wootric averages 9 months to return on investment, versus an average of 19 months for others in the experience management category, including Qualtrics and Medallia. 

Chart showing Months to Payback in Experience Management Category

Experience management platforms help businesses bridge the gap between the experiences they believe they are delivering to customers and the experiences customers are actually receiving. They enable organizations to collect feedback from their customers with surveys that measure net promoter scores (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer effort scores (CES). By combining and analyzing customer feedback from multiple channels, experience management software offers companies a holistic view of their customers’ experiences and how those experiences are impacting the business.

Wootric specializes in customer experience management for high growth B2B and B2C software-as-service and companies in digital transformation. Over 1200 brands worldwide are understanding and improving the post-acquisition customer journey with Wootric’s CLV-focused approach.

Enterprise users also gave Wootric the top rank for usability and easiest admin

“We understand that in order to have an impact, CX champions must engage stakeholders, democratize insights, and ensure data is at the fingertips of frontline teams in real-time,” says Prabhat Jha, CTO of Wootric. “Their needs drive our roadmap — whether we are talking about our native integrations with modern tech stack players like Salesforce, Intercom, Hubspot, and Segment or our flexible Voice of Customer analytics hub that can be customized to meet the needs of numerous stakeholder teams like Product, Support, Success, and Customer Insights.”  

The G2 Crowd Grid Report for Experience Management (Fall 2020) is a quarterly report that shows how the leading customer experience management solutions stack up to one another based on customer satisfaction and market presence. G2 Crowd’s scoring methodology blends data from user reviews and a vendor’s market presence, taking into account their social impact and market share, to generate the results for their Grid Report. Once scored, a vendor falls into one of four categories: Leader, High Performer, Contender, or Niche player.

This robust piece of research material should be read by CX practitioners and anyone evaluating a customer experience management solution. Learn exactly how each of the 26 companies included in the report received their score, their highest and lowest-rated features, satisfaction ratings, and more. Sign in and view this research on G2 to see:

  • Additional Data. Compare payback period (ROI) by vendor.
  • The G2 Crowd Grid visual
  • The Grid scores that determined each vendor’s placement
  • Side-by-side feature comparison
  • Methodology behind the scoring process

Learn how Wootric can help you improve customer lifetime value. Book a consultative demo today.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

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