Customer feedback is essential to improving in-store experiences and creating loyalty
It is universally known that engendering loyalty requires improving interactions with customers, but to achieve this it is necessary for retailers to continually generate feedback from their customers and use this as a way to measure how they are improving the experience in-store. By Glynn Davis
Ahead of speaking at the 3rd Retail Bulletin Customer Loyalty Conference 2012 in London on June 13th, Gary Topiol, managing director for EMEA at Empathica, runs through his thinking on improving the customer experience to earn long-term loyalty.
“It’s about turning customer transactions into great experiences and using this to build a relationship with these customers that then turns them into advocates,” he says.
To achieve this begins with understanding how customers interact with a retailers’ store and their business in general: “It’s journey mapping and at each interaction we ask what we would like an employee to do and how we would then like a customer to feel as a result of that interaction.”
Never Miss a Retail Update!What Empathica tries to avoid is developing “robots’ out of store employees that can be the case when mystery shopping is used. “It focuses too much on the mechanical, like whether the employee said ‘hello’ when the customer entered the store. Instead we try to encourage employees to have a personality when interacting with customers,” explains Topiol.
Before defining those interactions, Topiol says the local store teams need feedback from customers, which can be sought in a variety of ways – including scanning a QR code that then links them to a mobile questionnaire, calling a free-phone number, and via an online site.
Feedback from a minimum of 30-plus customers per store per month is required and normally there is a core set of questions for each store that are dynamically changed at the local level dependent on how the plan for the forthcoming month has changed.
What makes the Empathica programmes unique, according to Topiol, is that they understand what’s important to customers and also what are the underlying drivers of customer satisfaction. The company then ‘models’ out what are the most important to engendering customer loyalty.
There could be 150 drivers but he says this will be reduced down to 10 or 15, which will be applicable to all customer types, store types, and areas of the country. As Topiol states, there is no way to segment customers and then deal with them differently in-store: “It is the challenge of the store manager to deal with customers. They do not wear a badge that segments them.”
When combining the loyalty drivers with the customer feedback it is possible to develop an area for each store to focus on. Armed with this knowledge the next step is to develop an action plan for each store, which changes on an ongoing basis – with monthly iterations.
Rather than just supplying the stores with a dashboard from which they can access various reports Topiol says “we give them the tools to create the plans and get them to commit to it”. He adds: “It’s not about reports but is about having plans to work towards.”
He suggests Empathica has “encapsulated what great store managers do and incorporated it in technology”. What has helped make this possible is that over the last five-to-10 years the technology has been developed to cost effectively generate store level customer data.
Previously retailers were limited to brand-level customer satisfaction surveys and the only local level activity was undertaken via mystery shopping trips but only one such “piece” of research would have typically been done each month.
Proof that undertaking customer feedback and developing better customer experiences can boost customer satisfaction and loyalty comes from Boots. Topiol says that over the last two years the company has utilised the feedback from 30,000 customers each week to help it improve its satisfaction score by 23% – from 45% to 68% – that has not only increased loyalty but ultimately boosted the business’s bottom line.
“They certainly believe there is a direct correlation between customer satisfaction levels and like-for-like sales,” he says.
For full programme details, click here.
