Monitoring customer experience (CX) is one of the most important responsibilities of a retail manager as it has a direct impact on the bottom line of the business.
As CX performance is being monitored, you will ideally try to pinpoint where your products, personnel, campaigns, and service levels are failing or succeeding, so that you can take action towards improvement, and make adjustments as needed.
What does that mean in practice? We have a few tips and recommendations to share.
How many channels do you have for assessing customer experience data? Do you have enough data to work with? You need data to analyse performance, experience, and loyalty. If you don't have enough data from the field it gets hard to paint a clear picture.
When you audit the channels you have for this area, you will quickly learn whether those channels are the right ones for you to use, if in fact you need different channels, and need to decrease or increase the amount of channels you have. A tip for how to determine whether your channels are working as intended is the quality of the data you get from them; Is it actionable? Is it qualitative? Can you draw concrete conclusions from it?
Once you have a clear picture and structure of the channels you use and the quality and quantity of the data you get, you can start analysing it.
Main metrics you would want to collect for CX include:
These metrics don't only inform you about how happy your customers are, but also whether the service levels in the stores are up to par, if the campaigns you are running are relevant, the brand value of your business, and if the location of the store is good.
Make sure your customers have channels through which they can share their experiences. This will help steer them away from venting on social media.
Continuous feedback will help you pick up on trends and identify areas of success, and problem areas requiring work.
Don’t just collect feedback. Respond to it too.
If there are recurring complaints, head to the drawing board and decide on a solution. Once your plan is in action, monitor the situation to see if the issue has been effectively resolved. Last but not least, let people know that you are acting based on the feedback to have them feel like their voice is heard.
Make sure you identify the platforms on which customers are most active in. Once done, keep your eye on all areas of contact with the customer. This is important because your customers might be leaving good and constructive feedback for you online, and you should be responding to that.
By doing that, you will show your customers that you care what they think, and in turn encourage more feedback going forward. You will also increase loyalty with your brand and business.
Pay careful attention to CX reports from field personnel as they are many times the first point of personal contact with your customers. They will therefore have valuable insights that can be used to optimise operations, service levels and actions on what to do in order to avoid recurrence.
Once you have identified areas with room for improvement, introduce updated rules and codes of conduct to improve the situation, and monitor their effectiveness periodically. In that way you can step in faster and take action when needed.
People are sometimes afraid of saying what they observe. Create an anonymous channel through which employees can report colleagues who are mistreating customers or generally presenting a bad attitude, without fear of retaliation. Share this channel with your customers too so that they can report any feedback they might have.
Every customer’s experience with your brand cumulatively determines your reputation and in turn, your success.
To properly evaluate your performance with customer experience you need to be using proper channels of communication, and the correct metrics for measurement. Be actionable in your response to feedback and data trends.
Are you looking for a tool to improve customer experience in your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for low-threshold reporting, follow-up actions, anonymous reporting and analytics. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue, data collection, automated reports, and a lot more.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.