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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.