Agility Metrics Helps Grocery Outlet Strengthen Connections With Customers

February 15, 2012 Leave a Comment

Originally posted on PRWeb

 

 

 

Agility Metrics announced today that Grocery Outlet Bargain Market, America’s largest extreme-value grocer, has been using Agility Metrics’ Customer Experience Management solutions to capitalize on customer feedback, boost operational efficiency, and grow customer engagement across multiple channels. Over the past year, this solution has evolved to become a central part of Grocery Outlet’s ongoing efforts to strengthen customer relationships and build brand loyalty at a time when every shopper is looking to save that little bit extra on their grocery bill.

The custom built Customer Experience Management solution allows shoppers at Grocery Outlet to provide real-time customer feedback via web, IVR and mobile phones. A combination of powerful online reporting technology, role-based performance scorecards, and instant customer rescue alerts ensures that key Grocery Outlet stakeholders are constantly up-to-speed on the pulse of the customer experience across their entire network of supermarkets.

In addition, Agility Metrics has opened up exciting new ways for Grocery Outlet to engage with its most passionate customers on Facebook. With Clik2Tell, Agility Metrics’ cutting edge Social CRM application, thousands of thrilled customers have been able to share their great supermarket experiences with friends on Facebook. As a result, more customers are engaging with the brand’s Facebook fan page, while potential customers are learning about Grocery Outlet through the always effective prism of positive word-of-mouth.

“Agility Metris is a creative, responsive partner and we are very pleased with the relationship,” said Tom McMahon, Grocery Outlet’s Vice President, Sales and Merchandising. “For Grocery Outlet, customer experience is a competitive differentiator. The systems we developed with Agility Metrics give us real-time, actionable visibility into detailed customer feedback. We are making a measurable difference in customer experience.”

Click here to learn more about how Agility Metrics has helped Grocery Outlet strengthen connections with customers and work towards delivering more remarkable supermarket experiences.

Filed under Announcements, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback, Grocery, Retail Tagged with ,

Looking for the Staples Canada survey?

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

If you’ve been following this blog lately, you’ll know that we recently announced the fact that Staples Canada is the latest retailer to deploy our Customer Experience Management solutions.

If you’ve recently visited a Staples or Bureau en Gros location and you would like to provide your feedback, please use one of the links below.

Staples Canada survey: www.stapleslistens.ca

Bureau en Gros survey: www.bureauengrosopinion.ca

Staples Canada welcomes your honest and sincere feedback about your Staples or Bureau en Gros experience. Insights gleaned from these surveys will help Staples continue to deliver some of the best retail experiences in Canada.

Filed under Retail Tagged with ,

Mobile price matchers and the non-buyer experience

January 30, 2012 Leave a Comment

We’ve written a lot about the importance of measuring the non-buyer experience. But one emerging aspect of the non-buyer experience that we haven’t touched on a lot is the impact of mobile devices.

In a recent report, Pew found that, during the 2011 holiday season, 25% of all American mobile phone users leveraged their mobile devices in-store to make online price comparisons.  Pew dubbed this segment the “mobile price matchers.”

Put differently, 1 in 5 mobile-equipped shoppers whipped out their phones to digitally price check a product while standing inside a physical retail location. Amazingly, this share went up to almost 40% among mobile users aged 18 to 29.

This suggests a shifting paradigm. Once a relatively hermetic thing, the in-store shopping experience now meshes seamlessly with the digital shopping experience, thanks to the magic of Siri and Google Shopper and Amazon’s Price Check app.

But what should make retailers really snap to attention is an under-reported nugget within the Pew study.  Pew found that after the members of this segment had finishing digitally price checking a product, only 35% opted to purchase that product in-store. In 65% of cases, online price checking failed  to yield an in-store conversion event. As customers elected to keep their greenbacks and credit cards in their pockets and leave without making purchases, in many cases the foregone revenue eventually ended up in the tills of e-comm pure plays (insert grinning Bezos picture here).

Will mobile-augmented shopping lead to an increase in non-buyers flooding the floors of retailers? Will shoppers show up only to sample or try out a product, in preparation for an Amazon or Google-aided conversion event that will occur mere seconds after they walk out the door? That’s the fear right now, which is why retailers are rushing to develop omnichannel marketing strategies that will mesh together the bricks and mobile clicks on terms that are more favorable to them than to Amazon.

But when these digitally-enhanced shopping experiences do fully materialize, retailers will need to smash another paradigm: how they measure the quality of the experiences they are delivering in-store. The familiar, post-transaction, receipt-driven approach that everyone uses to solicit customer feedback must be disrupted and replaced by methodologies that are more sensitive to the new persuasion points that dot the omnichannel customer journey (e.g. the theatrical phenomenon known as the unboxing experience, where customers rip open and dissect their treasures, to the delight of millions on YouTube) .

Mobile will no doubt play a huge part. Retailers can lead or lag on this front—it’s up to them.

Filed under Customer Experience, Mobile, Non-Buyer, Retail Tagged with , , ,

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 Announcements, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback, Retail

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

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

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 Loyalty, Retail, Customer Feedback, Voice of the customer

Where Most Retail VoC Programs Fail

September 6, 2011 Leave a Comment

Part 3 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

Facing a retail customer who is both hyper-informed and highly conversational, today’s retailer relies on a VoC program to serve up the actionable bits of customer feedback that it so desperately needs. Unfortunately, that is where things often fall apart.

Most retail VoC programs that exist today excel at collecting and reporting on data. These applications do a wonderful job of capturing, aggregating, and reporting on customer experience data, and some are even accompanied by real human analytical muscle, which enables deep and complex interpretational inferences and conclusions.

But as strong as they are at capturing and reporting, most VoC applications fail when it comes to operationalizing that data and using it to transform their existing processes. Quite simply, they perform poorly when it comes to the mission critical task of funneling pressing feedback back to the right people within an organization and empowering those people to act rapidly to resolve store-level pain points.

Perhaps this is why voice of the customer programs often fail to change company processes in a real and meaningful ways, particularly at larger companies. Indeed, research has suggested that voice of the customer programs rarely achieve their promised transformational effect and that the bulk of corporate customer experience efforts end up languishing at relatively low levels of maturity.

Customer feedback is not unlike a highly radioactive element; it is something whose value decays incredibly quickly if it is not auctioned in close proximity to the actual experience. No matter how visually appealing the reporting engine, no matter how profound and insightful the deep dive analysis, and no matter how elaborate the modeling and statistical gymnastics, customer feedback programs prove their value if, and only if, they can deliver timely and actionable feedback to the right people. Regrettably, vendors often lose sight of this all-important fact when they engineer their solutions.

By subsuming customer feedback into standardized temporal buckets within their reporting tools (weeks, months, quarters), they lessen the impact of the data by dissociating it from the moment of experience. And, by constructing dashboards and scorecards aimed clearly at head office or corporate personnel, the vendors ensure that the data bypasses store-level staff—the very people who are poised to act at the moment of experience.

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

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

August 19, 2011 Leave a Comment

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.

Filed under Customer Experience, Customer Feedback, Retail

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