Looking for the Laura or Melanie Lyne surveys? Visit LauraListens.ca or MelanieLyneListens.ca

January 23, 2012 Leave a Comment

If you’ve completed a purchase at a Laura or Melanie Lyne location recently, and you would like to complete either the Laura Customer Experience Survey or the Melanie Lyne Customer experience survey,  then please use one of the URLs below:

Laura Customer Experience Survey – www.lauralistens.ca

Melanie Lyne Customer Experience Survey - www.melanielynelistens.ca

Laura Canada is a true Canadian success story. From a single boutique in Montreal, Laura Canada has grown to 173 stores and has become one of the most successful chains of women’s clothing stores in Canada.

Laura Canada welcomes your honest and sincere feedback about your Laura or Melanie Lyne experience. Insights gleaned from these surveys will help them continue to deliver great experiences for their customers.

Filed under Customer Experience, Customer Feedback, Retail

Staples Canada Partners With Agility Metrics to Implement Countrywide Customer Experience Management Program

January 16, 2012 Leave a Comment

Agility Metrics announced today that it has been chosen by Staples Canada to run its Customer Experience Management program at more than 300 Staples and Bureau en Gros locations across Canada. This program will help Staples maintain its leadership position as Canada’s largest everyday-low-price retailer of office supplies, business machines, office furniture, and business services.

“We’ve come across many vendors with impressive offerings, but only Agility Metrics possesses the vision, commitment to innovation, and complete flexibility that we need in a long-term Customer Experience Management partner,” said Lindsay Gillians, Team Manager for Retail Customer Satisfaction at Staples Canada.

With this program, Agility Metrics will help Staples raise the bar in terms of delivering remarkable customer experiences, driving deeper customer satisfaction, and increasing customer engagement. This comprehensive program will allow Staples to continuously capture customer feedback across all store locations and across multiple moments of truth, including the retail experience, the Copy & Print experience, and the Easy Tech support experience. Agility Metrics will integrate seamlessly with Staples’ internal business intelligence systems, ensuring that the voice of the customer meshes with existing data to provide a richer and more holistic picture of Staples’ customers.

Agility Metrics will deliver highly customized reports designed to rapidly surface actionable customer insights and identify specific areas of concern or specific opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. These reports will be tailored to the specific needs of individual job roles at all levels across the enterprise and will help Staples improve employee accountability and increase operational execution at the overall brand and local unit levels.

“The great part about this program is that senior management gets instant access to the insights that matter most to them,” said Kevin Knieriem, Staples Canada’s Manager of Retail Customer Experience Solutions, Communication & Services. “This way, senior managers can stay on top of the pulse of the customer experience as if they were standing right there at the ground level.”

Agility Metrics will also provide Staples with powerful tools to better manage delighted and dissatisfied customers. With Clik2Tell, Staples will be able to unlock the viral power of great customer experiences and drive brand advocacy across Facebook and other social networks. Additionally, Staples will be better equipped to respond to the needs and concerns of dissatisfied customers. Real-time customer rescue alerts will allows Staples’ managers to stay on top of customer issues through the automated delivery of alert messages and real-time management of service recovery events.

“Whether we’re talking about office supplies, business services, or tech support, nobody makes it as easy for customers as Staples Canada,” said Richard Pridham, President & CEO of Agility Metrics. “We’re proud to help this great Canadian retail brand pave the way towards even better customer relationships.”

Filed under Customer Experience, Announcements, Retail, Customer Feedback

Agility Metrics starts the New Year by hiring again!

January 5, 2012 Leave a Comment

Happy New Year!

Agility Metrics is kicking off 2012 in full-growth mode, and we are looking to hire a Marketing Research and Customer Insights Analyst.

If you’re a seasoned market research professional with strong analytical, technical, and logical thinking skills, then we definitely want to hear from you!

If the fit is right, you will responsible for survey methodology, questionnaire design, program documentation, quantitative and qualitative data analysis, including sophisticated modeling and delivering business insights to our clients. You will add value through a strong understanding of our clients’ needs and provide them with the analytical insights and strategic recommendations that will help them achieve their business goals.

More importantly, you will be joining a fast-growing provider of Customer Experience Management solutions, where you will get the chance to work with some amazing brands in the retail, food service, automotive, and healthcare industries.

For more information and to apply, please visit the full job posting on the Careers section of our website.

Filed under Announcements

Fix Auto Selects Agility Metrics to Run Its Customer Experience Management Program

December 19, 2011 Leave a Comment

Montreal, Canada (PRWEB) December 19, 2011

Agility Metrics announced today that it has been selected by Fix Auto to run a comprehensive Customer Experience Management program in over 200 collision and body shops across Canada. Known for its superior workmanship and service, Fix Auto is revolutionizing the collision repair industry by offering consistent, professional auto repair services that are accompanied by the highest standards of quality, ethics, and performance.

As part of the program, Agility Metrics will provide Fix Auto with the tools to continuously measure customer experience performance across its entire network of shops using a mixture of web and mobile data collection methods. Fix Auto will benefit from Agility Metrics’ cutting edge reporting and analytics tools, which are designed to surface actionable, role-based customer insights on a broad array of relevant topics. Agility Metrics will empower Fix Auto to repair at-risk customer relationships using its real-time customer recovery platform, while thrilled Fix Auto customers will have a chance to share news about their experiences with friends on social networks by way of Agility Metrics’ Clik2Tell social marketing app.

“We’re extremely pleased to be partnering with Agility Metrics to roll out this program across Canada,” said Manon Duplantie, President of Fix Auto. “We are known industry-wide for delivering great customer experiences, and with Agility Metrics’ industry leading solution, we will continue to achieve greater customer satisfaction, higher customer loyalty, and superior operational performance.”

“This partnership is yet more evidence that the most progressive brands in the automotive aftermarket understand the importance of measuring and managing the customer experience,” said Richard Pridham, President & CEO of Agility Metrics. “Time and again, research has shown that great customer experiences catalyze repeat business and brand advocacy in the automotive aftermarket. By investing in a program like this, Fix Auto has demonstrated its customer-centricity and has positioned itself to gain a clear edge over its competition.”

About Fix Auto

Fix Auto is a national network of body shops all maintaining the same standards of quality, ethics and performance. With over 200 locations across Canada, Fix Auto is the largest bodyshop network in Canada. For more information, please visit fixauto.com.

About Agility Metrics

Agility Metrics is one of North America’s leading suppliers of Customer Experience Management solutions. Agility Metrics leverages cutting-edge technology and deep sector expertise to help leading brands deliver remarkable customer experiences that get people talking.

Agility Metrics transforms customer feedback into actionable insights that brands can use to increase customer satisfaction, recover at-risk customers, and strengthen customer loyalty. From there, Agility Metrics unlocks the power of social marketing and empowers highly-engaged customers to spread positive word-of-mouth across Facebook and other social networks.

Staffed by passionate and dedicated people, Agility Metrics is proud to be servicing some of the leading retail, food service, automotive, and healthcare brands across North America.

For more information, please visit agilitymetrics.com.

Filed under Aftermarket Auto, Announcements, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback

The Importance of Identifying Shopper Intent

December 9, 2011 Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about the importance of measuring the non-buyer experience. The simple truth is that not all people who pass through a retailer’s doors have an intention to purchase during that shopping excursion. But, even among non-buyers, there are gradations, and these can best be understood through the lens of shopper intent.

Parsing out the various shopper intent segments allows the retailer to drill down into two critical non-buyer groups:

1. shoppers who intended to buy but were deterred by an easily identifiable and correctable buying barrier
2. shoppers who had no intention to buy, but instead were gathering information for a future (online or offline) purchase

In the case of the latter cohort, it is critical that the browsing session sculpts and influences the shopper’s next steps, such that the shopper returns to the company’s store or website to buy at a later date. The last thing a retailer wants is for his store to be used as a showcase or demo hall, where shoppers get a tactile sense for products in anticipation of conversion events that might happen at a competitor’s store or online presence. This is particularly the case when it comes to the sale of high-end electronics, as most shoppers will indeed pay a visit to a big box store to see, experience, and manipulate an iPad or an LED television, but their actual transactions will frequently take place at whichever website happens to post the lowest price for the item in question. Indeed, it is frequently said (not always in jest) that Best Buy stores function as the best possible showroom for Amazon.com.

To ensure a store experience that stands above the rest, it is invaluable to have feedback from a complete set of customers. The key to retaining customers and winning over new ones is relevancy — the ability to tailor shopping experiences to match the intentions and needs of customers. Customers will stay loyal to stores that have made the effort to understand intent and to demonstrate this understanding through a relevant customer experience.

The basis for this transformation must lie in a holistic and representative approach to customer feedback. While it will always remain important to collect experiential data from actual purchasers, converting browsers and researchers into buyers will require engaging with an entirely different set of non-buyer pain points, which can only be done if retailers have methods in place to measure the intent of every shopper that passes through their stores.

Filed under Best practices, Retail

We’ve made some changes to agilitymetrics.com!

November 28, 2011 Leave a Comment

We’ve just finished making some changes to agilitymetrics.com. We’ve redone the home page and added a brand new Products section. You can click the image below to get a feel for what the new home page looks like.

This is the first major change to our website since we re-branded in late 2010. With this new home page, we think we are better articulating our fundamental brand message and providing our visitors with a much more compelling reason to click deeper into our website.

In the new Products section, we have dedicated individual pages to each of our 4 offerings. It starts with Feedback & Insights, our flagship Customer Experience Management product. After that, there’s Customer Recovery, a powerful customer alerting platform that plugs seamlessly into Feedback & Insights. Mobile CEM is where we empower customers to provide instant mobile feedback at the point of experience. And finally, Clik2Tell is our revolutionary social marketing engine, which helps brand unlock the viral power of great customer experiences.

We hope that agilitymetrics.com is now a more intuitive, visually appealing, and pleasurable site to navigate. We invite you to head over and check out the changes, and please send us any feedback you have!

Filed under Announcements

When it comes to the customer experience, make sure you obsess about non-buyers also

November 4, 2011 Leave a Comment

When it comes to optimizing their store experiences, retailers obsess about how buyers feel and rightfully so. Keeping buyers happy enough that they return and make subsequent purchases is the only way to succeed in the retail environment, and any retailer that does not devote a substantial amount of resources to measuring, monitoring, and improving the purchasing experience risks putting its entire operation in jeopardy. But for every moment that retailers spend obsessing about the thoughts, perceptions, and future proclivities of actual purchasers, they should be spending another moment also obsessing about how to convert shoppers, browsers, or bargain hunters into buyers.

Buyers and non-buyers have vastly different cognitive orientations and pain points. While many retailers have embraced the notion of customer-centricity inasmuch as the buyer is concerned and, quite correctly, have implemented in-store customer feedback programs, relying on customer experience data from purchasers alone can paint a highly inaccurate picture of the overall shopper base. The fact that the buyer purchases an item means that whatever barriers to purchasing might have crept into his mind during the course of a store visit, these were somehow overcome over the duration of the shopping trip.

But in the case of non-buyers, purchasing barriers are real, insurmountable, and varied. They include:

> Product out of stock
> Trouble finding product
> Prices too high
> Trouble locating a sales rep
> Poor service from sales rep
> Long lines at checkout

Breaking down these barriers to purchasing — which is the first step towards boosting in-store revenue — means engaging with non-buyers, making sense of their feedback, and taking direct action to remedy whatever issues are causing them to walk out of the store empty-handed.

Ultimately, that means utilizing innovative techniques to gather feedback from shoppers who do not follow through with a purchase during their visits. To do so, feedback invitation paradigms need to be shifted and new, more innovative invitation methods need to be deployed. Ubiquitous feedback invitation methodologies — kiosks, digital signage, smartphone-readable quick response codes, or other advanced methods — must come to complement the existing, invitation-on-receipt methodology. Intelligent retailers, mindful of the differences between buyers and non-buyers, will want to gather data at as many persuasion points as possible, and not just at cash registers.

Retailers who take effective action to reduce the number of empty-handed shoppers who walk out their doors are putting themselves in a position to tap into the single biggest pool of potential revenue that exists today.

Filed under Customer Experience, Non-Buyer, Retail

Agility Metrics to Sponsor 2011 Fast Casual Executive Summit

October 12, 2011 Leave a Comment

Agility Metrics announced today that it will be sponsoring the 2011 Fast Casual Executive Summit, which will be held from October 23 to 25 at the Hotel Allegro in Chicago. The Summit will bring together a select group of top executives from the fast casual segment for two and a half days of networking and work group sessions designed to foster the exchange of ideas and innovations covering the industry’s top strategic issues.

The Summit brings together an experienced group of foodservice professionals whose common interests and concerns are brought to the table for open discussion. Topics to be covered at the event include: community marketing, reputation management, guest feedback management, emerging technologies, and the future of the food service customer. To kick it all off, there will be a tour of some of the hottest fast casual restaurant spots in Chicago.

“The Fast Casual Executive Summit is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting events in the entire foodservice industry,” said Valerie Killifer, VP Foodservice Media at FastCasual.com. “We are thrilled to have Agility Metrics onboard as a key sponsor. The presenters and participants at this year’s Fast Casual Executive Summit represent brands that are at the cutting edge of customer experience innovation, so Agility Metrics is a perfect fit for this event.”

“Agility Metrics is proud to be associated with the Fast Casual Executive Summit,” said Richard Pridham, President & CEO of Agility Metrics. “Agility Metrics has a comprehensive suite of products designed to help fast casual brands unlock the transformative power of the Voice of the Customer, deliver remarkable customer experiences, and maximize multi-channel customer engagement. We invite all participants to connect with us at the Summit and learn more about our company and our offerings.”

For more information about the Fast Casual Executive Summit, visit fastcasualsummit.com.

Filed under Announcements, Foodservice

For supermarket brands, driving home the savings message is key in tough economic times

September 29, 2011 Leave a Comment

These are tough times for North American families, and supermarket brands are being forced to adjust to the new reality. With high unemployment and rising food prices, putting a good yet affordable meal on the table is proving to be much more challenging for families than it used to be.

For discount grocery chains, low cost was always the key factor that enticed customers to visit their supermarkets. But in the current economic climate, even non-discount supermarket brands are realizing that constantly reminding customers of their savings advantage is more important than ever.

In talks with leading supermarket brands, Agility Metrics has discovered that store managers are increasingly interested in whether their front-line employees are consistently reminding customers of the money being saved by shopping at their supermarkets. And many have gone further and started measuring adherence rigorously, making “savings reminders” a KPI for their front-line personnel.

Our survey data suggests that this is an important factor for customers, too, as they react more favorably to supermarket brands that consistently remind them about how many dollars they’ve saved as a result of doing their groceries at a particular store.

When asked to comment on why they shop at a particular grocery store, happy repeat customers often refer upfront to how much they save, which is the key factor when selecting a grocery store as a first-stop on their shopping itineraries.

Moreover, our survey data suggests that identifying savings can go a long way towards securing long-term customer loyalty. Using the Net Promoter customer loyalty framework, we discovered that Promoters report significantly more often that their cashier highlighted the savings, while Detractors were significantly more likely to say their cashier had not circled their savings, adding to their overall sentiment that they would not recommend the store to others.

When customers are convinced that they are saving a few extra dollars on their grocery bills by shopping at a certain supermarket, it can be a huge competitive edge for that brand. Arriving at that state of conviction requires a comprehensive strategy for putting cost savings front and center at every step of the grocery shopping experience.

We’re in the process of preparing a more comprehensive study on the impact of “savings reminders” on purchasing behavior and customer loyalty in these tough economic times. Stay tuned to this space in the upcoming weeks for more details.

Filed under Grocery

Customer Feedback Evolved

September 19, 2011 Leave a Comment

Part 4 of a 4 part blog series.

Part 1: Retail customer feedback: why timing is everything
Part 2: The customer-centric retail era and what it means for vendors
Part 3: The customer-centric retail era and what it means for vendors<Where Most Retail VoC Programs Fail

For retailers to respond quickly and cogently to customers in crisis, they need to have systems in place that transmit realtime feedback to store-level personnel, so that those employees can act immediately
to remedy customer complaints and capitalize on opportunities to engender advocacy.

Agility Metrics has developed a timely, precise, and role-based feedback reporting system that not only delivers KPIs to marketers and executives, but also puts the voice of the customer front and center for regional and store-level management.

When Agility Metrics collects customer feedback data in a retail location, it utilizes an advanced analytics engine to parse the data and identify potential problem spots. Once these priority pieces of feedback are identified, Agility Metrics uses its proprietary reporting technology to send real-time alerts to store-level personnel. In doing so, Agility Metrics completely eliminates the time lag that traditionally has existed between the moment a customer provides feedback on an in-store experience and the moment that feedback is actually actioned.

Taking meaningful action close to the moment of experience drastically reduces the chances that an isolated event can grow into a long-term negative stance against the brand. Knowing that, Agility Metrics has engineered its customer feedback measurement solutions to be able to trace root cause resolution down to the department, sub-department, or even employee levels. With ready access to time-sensitive data, store-level personnel can take action to perform rapid-fire customer service when things go awry and move to capitalize on positive experiences by positioning targeted upsells and cross-sells.

Furthermore, Agility Metrics has loaded its push reporting technology with intuitive, powerful, and precise tools, each of which is design to make understanding and acting on feedback as simple and straightforward as possible for those whose jobs revolve around taking care of customers. This allows for intelligent
mobilization of different personnel tiers to handle different situations. To rectify a problem with store wide ambiance, the concerted efforts of all in-store staff might be required. But rude service from a single employee in an isolated department will, by its very nature, require a more precise and surgical handling. Intelligent, rolebased reporting is the only system that truly facilitates that.

Reacting to customer dissatisfaction means stressing rapid-fire accountability at every level of the retail pyramid—a chain of transparency and meaningful action that cascades from senior management all the way down to the individual store level.

Filed under Customer Experience, Customer Feedback, Customer Loyalty, Retail, Voice of the customer

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