Monitoring customer experience
does not
have to be a mystery
I have never been totally comfortable with mystery shopping as a way of monitoring the customer experience. In a service environment, customer experience can vary so much depending on the customer and the customer service staff member, the environment, the weather, the channel being used, store layout, and so many other factors.
And yet, historically, retailers in particular have financed large research budgets to engage mystery shopping firms to check on service quality issues.
It is important for retailers to achieve a consistency in format and presentation to customers and to check that this consistency is being achieved. Sometimes the mystery shopper might not tick all the right boxes because the service staff member has not done something that is prescribed practice. However, in real-life encounters this staff member might be terrific at establishing rapport and in fact generating sales.
The cost of intercepting customers and asking lots of questions, dampening any therapy the retail experience was providing, is not a very appealing alternative either, even though intercept research is still a standard method of collecting customer experience data.
Technology is providing new ways of measuring customer experience, which I believe will benefit customers and impose lower costs on businesses. At the moment, these alternatives are not being used much, but I believe we will see an increasing shift in the next few years as mystery shopping and intercept contracts come up for review. Where new systems are being used, there are a few problems with the technology that need to be ironed out.
Email capture enables businesses or researchers to send a website link to customers, which can facilitate completion of a survey on the recent customer experience.
Capturing emails becomes more important in customer contact
Following a recent two-day hotel stay I was sent an email asking me to comment on the experience. The respondent is encouraged to complete the survey by a prize draw for the month of June. This enables the hotel chain to obtain low-cost, prompt feedback on specific hotel performance and feed this into operational changes, potentially down to individual staff level.
Unfortunately, I was then sent a second email. Apparently, the system was programmed to send an email for every day’s stay at the hotel. Whoops, potential customer irritation. The programmers need to cull duplicate the names or cater for stays of more than one day.
This system requires call centres or customer contact points to request an email address as part of the interaction. While some customers may be reluctant to provide this information, these are likely to be customers who would not respond to a survey anyway.
More problematic is the impact of asking for an email address each time there is a customer contact. So, systems need to be able to easily achieve this. Swiping a loyalty card would seem to be the most effective method. But the Coles Fly Buys system clearly has not helped Coles build a loyal customer base. I suspect Coles has loads of data, but has not used it effectively (or maybe the right data is not being collected).
Where it is not possible to obtain an email address direct, it is possible to use tokens. Customers can be given a token with a link to a website that has a short survey. Using a unique identifier on the token for the store or point of contact and for the individual customer, it is possible to offer the customer the option to log into the website and complete the survey. By completing this process, the email can be captured for permission-based surveys and marketing activity.
We might expect a response rate for this type of activity anywhere from 5% to 35%, depending on the nature of the purchases (infrequent would tend to have a higher response rate than frequent shoppers), and this is still much more real than using a team of mystery shoppers. Plus it has the benefit of establishing a customer panel.
In my opinion, mystery shopping and shopper intercept are likely to be a rarity within five years as these new methodologies and technologies are adopted.
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