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Getting great feedback from your customers is no easy task—but when your business is based on selling a service, it can be even more complicated. Unlike retailers or restaurants, your products aren’t a quick-and-easy item that comes in a package. Delivering a great service—one that keeps customers coming back—means building real connections with your customers. Fostering customer trust is always a factor no matter what you’re selling, but in the service industry it’s the most critical part of building loyalty.

Service Management Group (SMG) helps brands connect with customers and employees by delivering a unique combination of technology and insights. This differentiated offering has resulted in significant year-over-year growth. As a result of their contributions, Michele Vance has been promoted to chief sales officer while Shad Foos has been promoted to chief marketing officer.

Being a customer experience (CX) professional can be tough at times. Native to the world of big data and tasked with thinking big picture, you walk a fine line between the granular and the grandiose, constantly looking for ways to translate terabytes to insights.

We all know how difficult it is to change your work habits. That’s why SMG is always trying to find new and innovative ways for our clients to get the data and insights they need, without disrupting their day-to-day jobs. When we launched the smg360® mobile app, we thought about how we could build a tool that adds the most value for clients’ employees by providing more convenient access to the data and insights they need, ultimately making their jobs easier.

Innovation is exciting. Constant advancements in technology and research mean there are so many different ways to make an impact on your customers—you can do it online, in-store, on mobile devices, through social media, and more. But turning those touchpoints into a seamless customer experience is easier said than done. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s critical to understand how each of these touchpoints functions, how they work together, and how to listen effectively to what your customers are saying along the way.

It’s not every day a chief executive hits a 10-year anniversary. But at SMG, we’re committed to doing what it takes to keep great people around for the long haul. We caught up with our Chief Information Officer Dennis Ehrich to pick his brain about his time at SMG, as well as the future of all things data and technology.

We’re lucky to work with really great, passionate CX leaders throughout the industry—and we’ve learned it takes a lot more than just technology and willpower to succeed. In our 26 years of service, here are 4 things we’ve seen leaders who truly “get” CX measurement do over and over again to deliver superior customer experiences.

Every year we host two client events—Forum in the spring and Power User Exchange in the fall—and after each one, we come away incredibly inspired by our clients’ passion to know more and do better. This year’s Power User Exchange was no exception. The insights we covered could easily fill a book—but for the sake of brevity, I wanted to give you the cliff notes version and share my 3 biggest takeaways.

In case you missed it, SMG recently made headlines with the acquisition of Nashville-based Catalyst Healthcare Research (CHR). While VP of Customer Engagement Dan Prince has already shared his thoughts on the partnership, I think it’s important to explain how we envision the move ultimately impacting our business. After all, SMG prides itself on being a strategic partner, and while that typically means delivering technology and insights that lead to more informed initiatives for our clients, we strive to be transparent about our own strategies, too.

It’s unfortunate, but most of us have been there: working a job that leaves you uninspired, unfulfilled, and eventually looking for something more meaningful. On the opposite end of the spectrum, many of us have been fortunate enough to find jobs that feel less like daily grinds and more like careers that tap into our true passions. And if you think back to those jobs that fall into the latter category, chances are they all have one thing in common: high-performing managers.

Data is a huge deal at SMG. We’re constantly looking for more ways to bring better insights to our clients—and our data science team is leading the search. Always thinking about what our clients might want to learn about their customers, we figure out what it would take to help them do it.

SMG is looking forward to spending time at this year’s MUFSO conference in Dallas, seeing familiar faces and meeting new ones. Every year we leave with our brains buzzing, ready to put everything we learned into practice. MUFSO gives us a chance to meet with top restaurant industry leaders, innovators, thinkers, and doers. We get a chance to step into our clients’ shoes—so we can know more about their business, and how to help them prepare for what’s on the horizon.

Service Management Group’s (SMG) technology capabilities are featured in the Forrester Voice of the Customer Vendor Landscape 2017 published this month. Forrester also recognizes SMG’s customer experience (CX) insights capabilities in The Insights Services Directory, Q3 2017 published in August. SMG is a global leader in customer experience measurement, helping more than 450 brands around the globe to listen, understand and act on feedback and behavioral data.

Short surveys are all the rage in today’s customer experience measurement (CX) landscape. Unfortunately, some organizations are cutting survey content at the expense of valuable insights. In an earlier blog, we touched on some of the pros and cons of shorter surveys. Now we would like to give you a guide to help you make the right decisions for your measurement strategy.

Our Employee Spotlight series highlights what makes SMG work—our people. Learn more about the team that brings technology and insights together, and what it’s like to work here. Get to know Ashley Knitter—Solution Developer and Thursday’s Core Galore ringleader.

There’s no doubt mobile will act as the primary enabler for the growing digitization of the customer experience. In the next 10 years, no new device will overtake the scale of the more than 6 billion mobile phones on the planet.

I’m often accused of being too nice. Clients tell me I should be far more blunt with them when their CX scores are not looking good. They also ask me to tell them more about what everyone else is doing. You can imagine the scenario: a client’s scores are up 2%, but how does this compare to the other brands in their sector? How has Brand X achieved a 6% increase, despite suffering from similar market conditions as the other retailers? How have they managed to create a culture whereby CX is genuinely a part of their business? What new technology is SMG developing to help us over the coming years?

Once your customers have started your survey, you want them to stick around ‘til the end. A huge factor in getting a good feedback sample is survey length. And with so many people completing surveys on mobile devices, it’s even more important. Here are some ways to ensure your surveys are short enough to encourage good customer participation, while still getting the deep insights you need to inform better business decisions.

In today’s world, we expect everything to happen instantly—instant messaging, instant rebates, instant meals. And when everything is moving faster, customers expect you to keep up the pace. Brands have made huge strides in automating and streamlining standard processes in their customer journey—including things like mobile ordering, buy online/pick up in-store options, drive-thru windows, and on-demand delivery—but sometimes being fast remains an obstacle.

Surveys are the driving force behind understanding the customer experience. Customers see surveys as an extension of your brand, and when done right, they can positively drive your business strategy. To position your CX program for success, we’ve got 5 common pitfalls to watch for in survey design.