Retail TouchPoints and Empathica webinar presentation| Retail
To view full webinar, visit http://cem.empathica.com/RTPEmp3rdPartyWebinar
The presentation explores the challenges retail operators are facing today and discuss how looking at the customer experience through a social lens may be the key to seeing the complete picture of customer feedback.
In the session you’ll learn:
How customer interaction with brands is changing – and why you need to combine solicited and unsolicited feedback
How taking a wide view of customer feedback can uncover systemic issues and trends in your business
How surveys and social media feedback can be used together to drive great customer experiences
To learn more about Customer Experience Management:
Product and services page http://www.empathica.com/products-services/
Resource center http://www.empathica.com/resources/
Blog http://www.empathica.com/blog/
Consumer insights reports http://www.empathica.com/consumer-insights/
Industry-specific expertise http://www.empathica.com/industries/
Connect with us:
Twitter http://twitter.com/EmpathicaCEM
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/EmpathicaCEM
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/company/empathica
4. #CustExp
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42. #CustExp
Q&A // Panelists
Gary Edwards
Chief Customer Officer
Empathica
Alicia Fiorletta
Associate Editor
Retail TouchPoints
MODERATOR
43. #CustExp
Thank You For Attending!
Download this presentation at: http://rtou.ch/custfeedbackweb
Editor's Notes
Throughout our presentation we encourage you to interact with our speakers by typing in questions and comments using the questions pane. We will be answering questions live both during the event and after the presentation.
Why is customer experience so important to us here at Empathica?Well the answer is simple, we believe that everyone deserves to love where they work, shop and dine. And in that belief the customer experience is one of, if not the biggest factor in achieving that objective
The history of customerfeedback.. Retailers have always been keen to gather feedback. After all rule number one of running a business is making sure you’re delivering on what your customers want and want to pay for. How you do that is pretty straightforward: just get to know your customers and ask them what they want. But what sounds so easy has actually evolved significantly over time and we’ve seen the speed at which this evolution occurs accelerate drastically over the past decade with the introduction of social media and crowd-sourcing. Here’s a brief history of the evolution of customer feedback:We’ve gone from personal relationships and personal conversations…… to the invention of market research… to the internet boom disrupting everything, including how much and how often we gathered customer feedback… to today where some might argue we’re in the midst of an even bigger disruption than the first internet boom with the explosion of Social Media
Surveys used to be easy, they were direct questions solicited directly through personal relationships. Believe it or not there really was a time when business knew everybody by name. The process was simple - ask 5-10 people you knew and get a good idea of how you are doing and what might need to change.
Then in the 1940s came the science of polling. Pioneers like Gallup began putting more science behind customer research and market research as we now know it began. Science was used to help researchers ask the right questions and uncover trends in customer sentiment. Not only did this provide more insightful information to retailers, t this point many retailers had outgrown their small business roots and now served more customers than they were able to know by name. Market research turned customers who were once friends and neighbours into demographics with similar habits and behaviours. This research was done by polling 1000s of customers to gather a breadth of feedback across the customer base.
The internet boom of the 1990s took customer feedback online. Empathica was one of the early pioneers to use the internet as a powerful medium for brands to gather customer feedback at tremendous scale, with considerable ease. Consider this: if the average retailer receives 30-50 customer feedback surveys per month across 1000 locations they will have collected well over half a million feedback surveys every year. Any good researcher or statistician knows that the quality and depth of insights can be greatly improved simply by increasing the quality, volume and frequency of data collection. The internet is, and will continue to be, to provide a powerful tool retailers can leverage to measure and imrpove the customer experience.
Fast forward to 2013 and you’ll see that the nature of customer feedback has evolvedagain and, this time, much more quickly. Traditionally customer research conducted over the internet was a one-way dialogue between the retailer and the customer. Today, the internet has once again opened up a new horizon and has changed the way consumers talk to one another and to retailers. Social media and online review sites have changed how, where, and when we communicate with one another; feedback can be shared with hundreds of people across many channels in just seconds. If we look at Twitter as an example, close to 3000 tweets are posted every second! The increase in volume, frequency and reach of this new evolution of customer feedback is making it increasingly difficult for retailers to manage the feedback and use it to make effective decisions across the organization.
Not only is this new type of feedback presenting a challenge to retailers it is also guiding consumers decision-making process.The results of the Empathica’s consumer insights research confirm this with 3 out of 4 respondents indicating that social media comments and reviews were influencing their purchase decisions.Even more interesting is that half of the respondents indicated that social media was their source for discovering and trying new brands.
The volume, frequency and reach of feedback has evolved over time and this evolution has accelerated exponentially with the introduction of the internet and social media. The challenge for retailers is to stay ahead of the curve and position themselves at the forefront of this customer feedback evolution.
Between market research, internet surveys and the emerging feedback coming out of social media and online reviews retailers are in a sense able to go back to square one.That is a very deep and personal understanding of what customers want, only now at tremendous global scale.The volume of feedback now coming throguh multiple channels allows retailers access to an unprecedented quality of data, that can generate the kinds of insights that allow them to now only understand what customers want, but actually do something to affect the behaviours to make them happen.our interest is in how we can harness this data to improve the customer experience. (stat on amount of new mentions?)
To make sense of feedback there are really two types......All this customer feedback is actually creating a huge opportunity for brands. The question is how can we take advantage of this opportunity and make customer feedback more effectiveThe first thing to understand is there are two aspects of customer feedback.The first piece of feedback are the conversations that are led by a retail brand. These are the directly solicited questions through surveys that are focused on understanding how you are executing from an operations perspective.On the other hand these days there is also considerable buzz, or voluntary feedback happening as well, particularly online. This natural buzz can also be a rich source of data. Particularly when it comes to upcoming trends in consumer sentiment,Ultimately the value of all this feedback only really becomes apparent I what brands do to react to it. That is how they use customer feedback to deteri=mine what is in fact important to consumers.
Leading the conversation:- Need to understand linkage and influence
Aggregating and summarizing the online buzzFragmentation and volume means we need to aggregate and summarize…tools for this are NLP and TA
A brand manager can use scored survey data to see that the brand’s overall satisfaction score has dropped 2% since the last period. This indicates that there is a problem but, at this point, he doesn’t have enough information understand ‘why’ the drop in score has occurred. He needs to uncover what is causing the drop.
He does this by using the text analytics tool to get more information. He sees a large number of negative mentions of the word ‘chairs’ and by drilling down into the topic of ‘chairs’ he can see that the biggest complaint is that the chairs in the waiting area are uncomfortable. Based on this information the initial reaction is that, in order to solve this problem, the brand needs to invest in buying more comfortable chairs.
However, by digging a little deeper using the text analytics tool, the brand manager seesa lot of complaints about the length of the line and the wait time.
Now the brand manager has a wealth of information he can use. He’s identified there is a drop in overall satisfaction and that uncomfortable chairs and long wait times appear to be an issue. Now, he can look to the leading the conversation survey data and the linkage data to see that they length of the line actually has a bigger impact on a customer’s overall satisfaction than uncomfortable chairs do. As a brand manager he can now focus hisefforts and resources on fixing the issue that has the biggest impact on satisfaction which is actually reducing wait time, not replacing the uncomfortable chairs.The key point: You need to both lead the conversation and follow buzz in order to truly understand the root cause of the problem, otherwise you’ll be mislead.
The best way for store managers to make sense of all the social feedback available to them is to filter out the noise first and simply present to them what is most applicable to them.In this case, by viewing that semi-structured feedback we discussed earlier (such as a review from a site such as Google+) alongside structured survey feedback, a location manager can not only see the qualitative sentiment their store has in cyberspace, but can see that review within the context of how they are doing according to their directly solicited feedback.It’s tempting to get caught up in responding to each individual piece of feedback. That puts you squarely in reactive mode. While its great to rescue a dissatisfied guest, that doesn’t actually deal with the cause of the problem. Something is still going wrong and it will keep happening until I do something to cause a change.The challenge with social media is to separate out rare events (the noise) from systemic issues (the signal).
As storemanager that means seeing integrated trends that are occurring across all my feedback channels. You don’t want managers trying to browse through multiple channels, using different tools, and trying to determine the patterns.You want simple. “Oh, look. Check out seems to be the biggest thing people are complaining about. Let’s see what they are saying.” The store manager can then click “check out” to drill-down to get more information.
Now the store manager can see all comments that contain negative sentiment about check out. She can also see my trends updated based on this new filter.The store manager can immediately see that the most common word in relation to “negative check out” is “slow”. Filtering the comments, I can now look through everything that mentions slow checkout, whether from survey comments, Facebook recommendations, or social reviews like Google+.Now the store manager has found a real issue occurring at my location – they seem to have an issue with slow checkout . That’s something she can fix!
The next step is to take concrete action to improve the customer experience by making sure the store improves the speed up the check out process. The store manager wantsto make sure that there are always enough cashiers available and so adds an action plan to ensure the store employees know what to do to ensure they improve speed of check out.
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Taking action helps you resolve issues and figure out what you need to work onThe other opportunity that has arisen out of this evolution is that a great experience doesn’t just impact one person, it is magnified through social media channels. The result is that a good experience now impacts thousands of people and the value of delivering a great experience goes far beyond the walls of that single location.
Throughout our presentation we encourage you to interact with our speakers by typing in questions and comments using the questions pane. We will be answering questions live both during the event and after the presentation.