Customer Feedback Today
It’s never been more important to know what your customers want. In an age where customer expectations are evolving faster than ever before, the pressure is on for all retailers to ensure that ‘exceptional’ is the norm.
When it comes to collecting customer feedback, many businesses still rely on tools that represent only a fraction of their overall customer base. Receipt based surveys, post-purchase emails, mystery shopping – all have their place, but are often expensive to run and slow. In a retail environment that demands fast innovation, timeliness is key.
TruRating, an ASG partner, is reinventing the way businesses collect customer feedback. By asking one simple question, displayed at payment, TruRating helps businesses achieve an incredibly detailed understanding of customer satisfaction across a wide variety of touchpoints. With 80% + response rates, TruRating provides a truly representative cross-section of your customers, in real-time.
Intelligent Questions – How do they work?
While volume of data is of course important for statistical relevance, what really matters in today’s environment is context. It’s important to know how your customers feel, but what if you could ask them specific questions based on the time of day, which products they’ve purchased and which department they are buying from?
TruRating’s Intelligent Question Logic allows retailers to ask context-specific questions to customers providing a level of granularity and insight previously unimaginable. Whether you are testing new brands, investigating customer sentiment towards your loyalty program, or rearranging your merchandise and want to find out how much easier items from certain departments were to find, Intelligent Questions allow for an extremely targeted approach to customer surveying, ensuring that every question you ask is provides the maximum amount of insight.
ASG’s VIA|store point of sale platform is a central depository for a wide cross section all of the retailer’s operational data including sales and customer loyalty data. VIA|store can provide a rich set of targeting criteria to power the TruRating Intelligent Question logic.
Intelligent Questions in Action
The opportunities for retailers to deepen their understanding of the Customer Experience with Intelligent Questions are near endless, here are just a few examples:
Brand Research
If you’ve chosen to introduce a new brand to your store, it’s important to understand how your customers are reacting. While sales data clearly provides a baseline level for customer response, intelligent question logic allows you to ask questions to a deeper level.
At a top level, a retailer may want to know something as simple as ‘Are you happy we introduced this brand? Yes or No’. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. A luxury fashion retailer is likely to be deeply concerned with meeting their customers’ expectations, ‘Do you feel this brand belongs in our stores’ offers a definitive indicator for any store manager worried about introducing a range that may not meet the high standards they strive to maintain.
Alternatively, if basket data shows that a customer has not purchase a newly introduced line, intelligent questioning can be used as an awareness tool – ‘Did you know we know stock clothes by ___? Yes or No’. If the response is overwhelmingly negative, perhaps the issue maybe the way your stock is laid out in store. The ability to test and learn in real-time, dramatically increases the speed by which you can learn what’s working in-store, and significantly, what’s not.
Customer Relevant Questions
It can be hard to derive granularity from generic questions around buckets such as ‘Service’ – however asking every customer about their experience in the shoe department doesn’t make sense unless a customer purchased shoes. With intelligent questions, you can ensure targeted questions are triggered by specific products, allowing for maximum impact.
A luxury department store may be focussed on delivering an incredible changing room experience, but to ask every customer about this would likely drive fatigue ultimately. It’s reasonable to assume however that certain items of clothing are more likely to be tried on formally (a dress vs. a scarf), intelligent questions allow for this discrepancy when triggering.
In some cases, the amount spent may be the relevant variable to trigger a question. A customer who walks into a golf store and spends over a $1,000 is likely to have required a different kind of service to the customer picking up some new golf balls. In the case of the high spending customer it may be more appropriate to dig into the details, ‘Did you receive a thorough walkthrough of the products your purchasing today?’, ‘Was it your first-time shopping with us today?’, ‘Are you new to golf?’.
The possibilities are endless, but the ability to trigger questions on the basis of product or $ amount, provides retailers with the ability to collect specific and timely responses to in-store initiatives, in a manner sensitive to their customers’ needs and expectations.
Actionable Data
Collecting the data is only part of the answer. The key is to make the data collected actionable in a timely fashion. There is tremendous power in combining the operational metrics of the business from ASG with the Customer Intelligence analytics from TruRating. Together, these tools give the retailer unique insights into their business that allow them to see their challenges and instantly respond to their customers.
Contact us to learn how ASG and TruRating can help your organization differentiate yourself from 72% of businesses that claim customer experience is their main priority.
NRF Big Show – New York
Accuvia Software Group and TruRating will be demonstrating their integrated solution that highlights the power of the Intelligent Questions at the National Retail Federation trade show in New York in January.
Please visit us in booth 662 or make an appointment to speak with our team in New York.
