The customer-centric retail era and what it means for vendors

Without a doubt, we live in one of the most customer-centric eras in the history of retail. The paramount importance of measuring the retail customer experience is widely understood, and strategies and tactics for how to do it best are on the lips of every self-styled guru or evangelist, in the pages of every how-to book, in the keynotes of every seminar or conference speaker, and in the words of every blog dedicated to dissecting the optimization of the customer experience.

The injection of the ethic of customer centricity into the processes and procedures of 21st century retail life has certainly been a good thing. Retailers have become more progressive, more responsive, and, ultimately, more attuned to the wants and needs of their customers. They have understood that their customers are their most precious assets and they have invested in programs designed to engender long-term loyalty and purchasing commitment. Many have even tied measurement of the customer experience into performance and compensation calculations. A survey of over 140 large North American companies conducted in the early part of 2010 discovered that 60% of these companies were running formalized VoC programs, and, of these, 45% were linking compensation directly to patterns in customer feedback scoring.

Vendors have been quick to respond by providing myriad retail Customer Feedback Management solutions, all of which are engineered to capture in-store customer experience data (typically using some variety of multi-modal survey architecture) and to break this data down using advanced reporting and analytical tools, with the goal of extracting valuable customer insight.

With the rapid and broad-based proliferation of these solutions, the retailer who is looking to invest in a Customer Feedback Management program faces abundance—some might say a superfluity—of choices. A brief survey of the current marketplace reveals a broad spectrum of tools for capturing and reporting on customer feedback, ranging from complex enterprise feedback management software packages to simple, do-it-yourself online survey authoring tools.

As a result, retail customer feedback collection has largely become commoditized, and merely being able to capture and report on customer feedback relating to a specific store-level experience is no longer a mark of merit or differentiation among vendors.

Instead, the focus has shifted to vendors who can deliver timely customer insight and a new differentiating competency has emerged: the ability to rapidly identify actionable pieces of customer feedback and convey this information back to key internal stakeholders so that they can take action to remedy or rectify customer complaints.