With stories of Black Friday UK shopper mayhem all over the news closely followed by Cyber Monday, it’s clear the Christmas shopping season is well and truly upon us. Scores of customers are headed to your brick-and-mortar stores in search of great deals.

But value isn’t all festive shoppers are looking for. Across the board, consumers are also hoping to find exceptional customer experiences that allow them to shop on their terms, using the newest technologies to drive their choices.

For many retailers, this is the “make or break” time of year, accounting for 30 to 70 percent of their annual sales. The point often missed is that while a 30-day shopping window determines survival, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what brings customers back and determines longer term success.

Improving customer experiences

There is clearly an imperative for exceptional customer experiences at this time of year. Since the festive season represents many consumers’ first interaction with your brand, your ability to bring seasonal buyers back after Christmas hinges on the quality of your customers’ experiences this month. This may be your only time to create a positive impression.

But relatively few brands emphasise the delivery of high quality customer experiences in the Christmas rush. Far too often, customer service takes a backseat to moving as much product as possible with little regard to the experience surrounding it. Although it may be necessary to staff up stores with inexperienced, seasonal workers, temporary staffing without adequate training and a clear sense of company mission to deliver a great retail experience presents a serious threat to the brand.

Alongside an investment in experience training, it’s critical to provide near real time customer feedback in order to stay on track and keep serving up great experiences as a top of mind activity for all staff. Here are a few simple ways to do so:

Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is to funnel massive amounts of unanalysed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights, especially during the year’s busiest shopping season. Rather than overwhelming managers with information that really isn’t useful, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the shop floor. Empower them with real-time customer feedback insights that make clear in just a few minutes what their local store issues are and what they should work on to provide great experiences.

Provide Actionable “Right Now” Strategies

Complex retail reporting tools are in abundance but they don’t always make clear today’s winning moves. Providing actionable, data-based strategies that can be acted upon “right now” is essential. Store managers need to be freed up as local leaders to focus on the rapid implementation and execution of plans to improve the quality of the customer experience throughout the Christmas shopping season.

Leverage Social Learning

It takes time for store managers to learn how to intuitively respond to customers’ concerns. But collectively, your brands’ store managers have a vast base of knowledge about specific strategies and actions that can improve the customer experience during the Christmas season. Consider leveraging virtual knowledge sharing and other technologies that enable social learning across the brand.

In many ways, Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools are your brands’ best resources for improving local customer experiences during the festive season. By implementing the right technologies, you can significantly increase your ability to provide location managers with the real-time, actionable insights they need to truly delight Christmas shoppers and keep them coming back throughout 2014 – and that should add up to a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

I recently received an email inviting me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey from one of my favorite online outdoor equipment retailers. I freely admit that I only opened it out of competitive curiosity. When I opened the email, and it promised to take only two minutes and ask two simple questions, I exclaimed, ‘An NPS survey! ROCK ON!’

But that was me speaking as the survey taker. As a data scientist and survey analyst, I recognized the shortcomings of an NPS-style survey. There’s no way to control the data points in the sample, so this equipment retailer wouldn’t be getting the data required to slice and dice my results in interesting and meaningful ways.

For example, they wouldn’t be able to narrow results down to a particular type of service, a particular shift, or a distinct product. They wouldn’t even be able to do a basic regression analysis to identify key drivers. On the other hand, is it really worth it to swing the opposite way and create an experience-killing 47-question survey? Probably not.

Which brings up one of the major conundrums faced by VoC practitioners today:

There is a fundamental disconnect between the way customers want to share their experiences and the way researchers want to control the scientific sampling of information. The result is friction in the feedback process.

No More “Us Vs. Them”

Consumers want fewer questions. Companies want robust analysis. The smart companies are doing what the consumer wants—but the even smarter companies are finding ways to satisfy the interests of both parties.

Today, there are ways to begin cutting the length and overall friction from your satisfaction surveys today, without sacrificing your useful back-end insights. Here are three things I would recommend to any forward-thinking customer experience practitioner trying to find the fabled frictionless feedback:

1. Use the Power of Text Analytics

Shorter surveys don’t have to mean smaller data sets, as long as you’re asking the right questions and taking advantage of powerful natural language processing engines. Mindshare Monitor™ and Mindshare Discover™ are both supercomputing solutions that can extract profound structured meaning from free-form text.

Learn all you can about using this powerful technology, experiment with it, and find out which of your survey questions have become redundant.

2. Separate Your Feedback Channels

Just because you’re favoring shorter surveys doesn’t mean you have to completely give up on longer market research-style surveys. You can dedicate separate feedback channels to administering two separate surveys simultaneously:

1. A short review-style survey that any customer can comfortably complete.
2. A longer research-style survey providing granular details for analysing new product introductions or marketing research.

Your goal should be to offer your customers a good feedback experience while still collecting enough data to power other types of analytics.

3. Shorten Surveys

Identify which data points are the most important to your goals—and ruthlessly eliminate the rest. Not only will this provide a better experience to your customers, it will drastically simplify analysis. If you’re collecting more data points than you need, you might be creating more questions than you are answers. If you can’t arrive at a decisive action after asking yourself a “so what” question, consider eliminating the metric.

For example, a restaurant survey may have a question inviting the customer to “rate our tabletop displays.” You learn you have an average rating of 73 out of 100. So what? Well, it means your displays should be better. So what? Well, a 10% increase in those ratings should mean people learned more about your product. So what? You get the picture.

Think Forward and Implement Now

Customer tastes and preferences around survey-taking behavior are changing. The forward-thinking customer experience practitioner will see this as an opportunity to start implementing the most advanced review-oriented survey techniques to provide a great frictionless feedback experience to customers—while collecting an even broader data set.

Restaurants, bars and pubs rise and fall based on the experiences they provide to their guests. This can be particularly challenging for multi-unit operators where location managers must walk a fine line between maintaining a consistent brand experience and tailoring the experience to the demands of local patrons.

Managing the Guest Experience

An optimised CEM model should be a priority for any hospitality brand that values the quality of local guest experiences – and it begins with a three-step strategy designed to equip managers with the resources they need to quickly transform guest insights into tangible actions.

Focused Insights

Sending large quantities of unfocused guest feedback to location managers is a losing strategy. Today’s most advanced CEM solutions can empower location managers with daily action plans based on the most recent feedback insights for their location and across the brand. Using sophisticated CEM technology, managers can have an action plan in place within minutes of receiving relevant and location-specific guest feedback information.

Action-Focused Tools

While hospitality chains employ sophisticated feedback solutions, most location managers don’t possess the skills and training it takes to derive meaningful insights from complex reports. A better approach is for brands to equip location managers with technologies that do the work for them. Ideally, managers will be given access to solutions that present focus areas for improvement in a simple, clear user interface.

Shared Knowledge

The social knowledge-sharing capabilities offered by leading CEM solutions can provide several benefits. Less experienced managers gain access to virtual knowledge centres and other resources that work to fill gaps in their brand experience. Additionally, fostering this type of communication within a brand helps to build the brand’s internal community. Regardless of the amount of experience, all location managers have the ability to turn guest feedback data into specific improvement actions that can be shared as best practices brand-wide. This crowd-sourcing helps ensure a consistent brand experience and optimises the value of guest feedback insights.

A higher level of guest satisfaction (and ultimately brand advocacy) is being achieved through the implementation of CEM solutions and other technologies that give hospitality brands the ability to use guest feedback as a key driver of location performance. Instead of giving location managers more data that they need to wade through, these solutions equip managers with the actionable strategies they need to achieve meaningful improvements in the guest experience.

As a father of a toddler I’m no stranger to fatigue. Interestingly that also plays into one of the most common questions I get asked when it comes to customer experience management – What are some ways to reduce the risk of survey fatigue on the part of consumers?

Within surveys themselves there are four key elements that can serve to minimize fatigue on the part of a consumer:

1. Only ask important questions

Survey length is strongly correlated with drop-off rates in surveys. It is important that surveys only ask questions that are impactful to the results you want to achieve. A market insight driven approach to developing your survey based on a combination of cross-brand best practices and brand-specific loyalty modeling is the first step. Loyalty modeling can statistically determine which factors drive key outcomes, like overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend, for your specific brand. This allows the survey design to prune questions that do not actually lead to useful results.

2. Make the survey appropriate for the medium

Data collection platforms should support a large range of media: computer web browsers, smartphones and tablets, or phone-based (IVR/CATI). Each media has different needs in terms of structure, length, and question wording in order to prevent fatigue. The ability to vary the set of questions, wording of questions and answers, and the visual layout of surveys for different media allows each survey medium to be used most effectively.

3. Give control to the respondent

Fatigue is caused by the mental state of the respondent – “This is taking too long” or “This feels like work.” Surveys can and should be segmented. All respondents are asked a short set of core questions and then given an option to complete a second longer segment that asked more detailed questions. Empathica’s testing with the same set of survey questions shows that adding this optional element reduces fatigue and results in more fully completed surveys.

4. Selective sampling

If it is not possible to create a survey of reasonable length due to the number of factors involved (operational efficiency, marketing, product feedback, etc.) then selective sampling can be used. This essentially allows you to use several smaller surveys at once. Any particular respondent will be asked a specific subset of questions. The ratio at which each subset of questions is asked can be set. For example, you may want 90 percent of respondents to be asked about operational efficiency and 10 percent about the effectiveness of a promotional campaign. In this manner no one particular respondent must answer everything but the total set of survey responses will give you insight across the full question set.

There are also methods to reducing fatigue across surveys:

Multiple surveys at once.

If you have a need to gather information about several discrete topics at once you can use selective sampling (described above). This allows you to invite a large respondent group and those that respond will be proportionally split across your surveys. You do not need to pre-segment your list and hope that enough respond from each group.

Multiple surveys over time (periodic eblasts).

While most satisfaction surveys are ongoing invitations, they can also be supplemented with periodic eblast services. Eblasts are based on specific lists of contacts and can be segmented to ensure that the same respondents are not over-invited to surveys.

Industry research has proven that the majority of consumers are interested in providing valuable feedback to retailers about their shopping experiences. However many companies seem to forget the tenets outlined above and are left struggling to understand why their programs aren’t getting the anticipated adoption by their customers. Plan to prevent fatigue during the build phases of your program and chances are excellent that you will experience higher response rates and less drop-offs.

One of the most common questions I receive is about how a brand should combat negative comments in social media.

It’s true. There are many horror stories that you are most likely familiar with of negative word of mouth spreading like wildfire through social media. Employees and executives behaving badly, questionable product quality, poor treatment of customers – these are the stories that many people love to spread, and many brands in turn are wary of opening up their social media channels because of this. The reality is however that these are by no means the only comments about brands customers are making online.

In fact, customer experience programs that stress active advocacy may serve as the perfect solution for brands concerned about negative sentiment.

There is an old adage in sports that “the best defense is a good offense.” In other words, by being more proactive in any activity, you can reduce the harm caused by any oncoming risks.

In the world of social media and active advocacy this strategy has two prongs. First, by encouraging happy customers to become advocates of your brand, you can effectively build a safety net of positive sentiment throughout the online world that can cushion the negative effect from any negative comments that may pop up once in a while. What better counter to a negative portrayal of your brand online than to simply reference back to hundreds if not thousands of pre-existing positive stories of great brand experiences from your own happy customers.

A customer experience management program can also serve as an offensive weapon against negative commentary through the alert mechanisms that most have. These customer alerts allow brands to intercept unhappy customers at their moment of truth, allowing an opportunity for management or brand representatives to reach out personally to improve their brand experience before any negative sentiment is released to the world.

Customer alerts while simple in nature can be quite profound in their impact. By connecting brands directly to unhappy customers, brands are able to open up a true dialogue with them, to glean often meaningful insights, while also having an opportunity to create more advocates as well. After all, what better experience to share on social media than a brand so dedicated to customer service that they reached out to you in a timely and personal manner to correct an issue that you had reported.

Two facets of a simple strategy to reduce the risk of negative online sentiment the old-fashioned way: leverage positive word-of-mouth and never take a single customer for granted.