With the buzz surrounding the 2012 Olympic Games reaching fever pitch in the UK and an anticipated 11 million visitors due to descend on the capital city, many organisations will be carefully considering how they can manage or enhance their customer experience for the duration of the event for maximum benefit. However, without the right staff and staff management, a solid customer service strategy, and a way to listen to what customers really want, these organisations are probably risking customer loyalty in the longer term.

The good news is that the pitfalls can easily be avoided by good forward planning and putting some thought into how your location dynamic will change throughout the Games.  To start the process here are my top five tips on how to satisfy customers during this exciting period, learned from working with leading retailers and hospitality organisations over the past few years.

Tip #1 – Hire people who like people

Many brands are going to have to rely on temporary staff over the Olympic period, as regular team members take holidays and extended opening hours result in needing additional resources.

We often see customer satisfaction dip when organisations are reliant on temporary staff  who care less about customers and the success of the company, and may be less customer-focussed (school holidays and Christmas being notable examples).

Be as stringent in your hiring practices for temporary staff as you would for permanent staff – ensure that you are getting people who are naturally inclined to be customer-focussed, and a lot of the potential issues will look after themselves.

Tip #2 – Be thoughtful about your staffing rotations

Think about it, when your manager or deputy manager takes the day off, or when you lack experienced team members in your location, it’s ultimately the customer that suffers.

At Empathica, we see this happen a lot with our clients. We have worked with several organisations to identify weak spots during their trading week (Sundays are chief culprits here!) and improve senior staff cover in locations. As a result, we’ve seen massive improvements in customer satisfaction levels through our Customer Experience Management programmes.

Make sure your best and most important people are spread across the week and don’t leave inexperienced staff to cope alone.

Tip #3 – Let your staff have fun

It’s simple – happy staff lead to happy customers. We have seen on many occasions that one of the key predictors of whether a customer will enjoy their experience – and subsequently actively advocate for a brand – is whether they perceived the team to be enjoying their jobs while they were in the location.

Allow your staff flexibility to get into the spirit of the Olympics, and participate appropriately in the major events, and customers will notice the positive atmosphere and respond accordingly.

Tip #4 – Focus on your customers

This seems like a truism, but is worth mentioning. The influx of thousands of Olympic ticket holders from across the globe is likely to deliver unusual demand patterns and a whole heap of associated logistical challenges. When facing this type of challenge, it’s not unusual to observe organisations turning inwards and focussing on things they feel better equipped to manage: out of stock items, wastage, shrinkage…

But you cannot lose sight of the most important measures: including how your customers feel.

To succeed at delivering a great customer experience, you need to understand what your customers want and focus on delivering it. If you do have a Customer Experience Management programme, make sure you know what your key drivers of customer advocacy are, use the programme to listen to what customers are saying, and reinforce great behaviours every day.

Tip #5 – Think about the tourists…and what they can teach you about your customers!

London in particular will have thousands of visitors from many different countries for the duration of the games. I’ve seen organisations planning extra signage in their locations here because they are uncertain that new customers will find their way to what they want; or simplifying their menus to make the most popular items easier to find; or training their teams to be extra helpful in case they spot customers looking confused while in locations.

If you are doing any of these things, great! Thinking about your customer experience through the eyes of the customer is a positive thing. But one question: why did you wait for the Olympics to do it? Imagine if you’d made these changes a year ago. How many more satisfied, loyal customers would you have spending more with you, and telling their friends to visit you?

“What is the one thing that can make the biggest difference to my customers today?”

This is a seemingly innocuous question, but one that can have far-reaching impact. For local managers this is likely a question they ask themselves every day. Their job is to motivate and guide their staff to deliver great branded experiences, and coach them on the little things to focus on to make the biggest impact for their customers.

Getting to the answer to that simple question however, is all too often anything but simple.

Running a location is an all consuming job. Location managers are asked to do many things. In both a figurative and literal sense they’re the ones tasked to keep the lights running on a day to day basis. As such their time is incredibly valuable; from dealing with logistics, to dealing with staff issues, locations managers have little time for tasks that fall outside their immediate duties. In many cases this means managing a customer experience program falls through the cracks.

Customer experience management programs have been used for many years as a mechanism to ensure operational efficiency. In many cases however the results of these programs have hit a standstill. One of the reasons for this is how these programs have evolved into rather complex data analysis programs. All too often programs require managers to focus on time consuming reporting, rather than helping them drive actions and develop new behaviors in their staff.

So how can these programs evolve to help local managers better focus on and understand what can be done each day to have the biggest impact on customers?

Some elements to consider when considering how to drive more action from a customer experience program are as follows:

Simple, clear information

Location managers need answers and focused directions, not more work. These busy professionals need tools to help surface only the information critical to them and to present it in a way that makes sense to them.

Select and align each location with specific top priorities

Location managers are not data analysts – they do not have the time or training to become one. Look for customer experience tools that provide algorithms to analyze the data and deliver insights so that they don’t have to. The right tools can provide specific focus areas and clear target objectives. This allows busy managers to focus their time on executing on priorities.

Action plans to execute behavior change

Knowing what area of the customer experience that needs to improve is just the beginning of a successful customer experience program. If the staff does not change their behavior then the customer experience will not improve. A location manager’s role in the customer experience program should be to coach and motivate the frontline staff to drive behavior change that will benefit the customer.They need the knowledge and the tools to execute this behavior change. The right tools should be able to present an action plan based on best practices for their specific focus areas.

Social sharing of best practices

Locations should be able to learn what actions have been successful in other locations with similar issues. Best practice libraries are living online resources that can adapt to the real world. Location managers (and their regional managers) can use these tools to contribute new actions and give feedback on which actions work well and which do not.

Status monitoring to track progress

Locations need an easy way to track their overall progress as well as the execution of specific staff behavior. In thirty seconds location focused tools should be able to tell a manager exactly what the staff is successfully executing on and not. This enables data-driven conversations based on real customer insights.

Having returned from the annual National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show conference in New York I am increasingly excited for the opportunities that lie ahead for retailers. Each year retailers and solution providers from around the globe gather to discuss the latest trends in retail and share best practices around how best to adapt to the road ahead.

The central theme of this year’s show was focused around bringing the human element back to the retail experience. This echoes the sentiment that is our raison d’etre here at Empathica – retailers and consumers need to reconnect at a human level. The engine of the global economy depends on it.

Retail truly is the engine of the global economy when you take a moment to study some staggering statistics:

• Retail supports 1 in 4 jobs in the US economy
• Retail in the US is forecast to grow 3.4% in 2012 (compared to estimates of US GDP growth of 2.1% to 2.4%)
• Retail contributes over $2.5 trillion to America’s GDP each year

From the opening keynote by former president Bill Clinton, through the educational sessions I attended, and the conversations I had with other delegates, it’s clear that retail provides a pathway out of the recession. A back to basics approach is needed to running a business. Most people have a favorite retailer where employers and customers’ have elevated their relationship to that of a friendship. If not, then you have heard stories from parents and grandparents of a time when the locally focused small businesses were able to deliver a very personal experience to their loyal customers. As time went on, successful businesses began to grow, and sadly achieved much of this scale by focusing on growth and increasing their points of distribution often to the detriment of those necessary friendships and relationships.

Today’s innovations in technology have created a turning point in the world of business.  Technology is now becoming a tool allowing business owners to rebuild these relationships and maintain them on a global scale.

The challenge that now emerges is how to convert this capability to an actionable model.

• Retailers need to actively solicit feedback from their customers and then engage with them at a deeper level. This can be done in three ways. Use marketing science to understand what drives loyalty. Dig deeper… knowing for example that friendly service outranks other loyalty drivers isn’t enough. The real question is, what are the elements of the experience that build a belief that this brand is friendlier than all others?
• Deliver a consistent brand experience at the ground level. I argue that its more important for most retailers to become more consistent than it is for actual improvement in their overall service quality scores. Reduce the anxiety and make the choice simple for customers by letting them know ahead of time exactly what they’ll get.
• Finally, use technology to help personalize the shopping experience. Social media, mobile phones and the new consumer behaviors they foster have created tremendous innovation opportunities. It’s interesting that one of the competitive advantages online retailers have developed over the last few years is a much deeper personal relationship with many consumers. Recommendations, complimentary products, remembering history and preferences… in many ways technology has effectively allowed online retailers to personalize a highly impersonal experience.

I leave you with an interesting exercise that I was challenged with by one of the speakers at the conference. Each day when we all prepare for work, we should challenge ourselves to complete this phrase “What the world needs now…” (yes I know I can Google the remainder of the Burt Bacharach lyrics). Such a simple yet profound phrase can help put the value of what we all do each and every day in a new context.

Do you know what your customers expect when they walk into your location?

It’s a simple question, though for most the answer to that question can be quite difficult. That’s unfortunate because in many ways the level of success that a business can achieve is limited by how close they can get to truly delivering on those customer expectations.

I was listening to a radio presenter introducing singing sensation Adele recently, what he said stuck with me:

“There’s nothing quite like the feeling, when you’re listening to a song, written by someone you don’t know, who you’ve never met, who somehow manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life…”

What a wonderful introduction to a great artist, and in the context of business a simple yet lofty goal to strive for. As a business, is it possible to have such a deep understanding of your customers that you can create and deliver an experience so exceptional that it feels almost as though your store or restaurant was created solely for them? Segment leaders seem to be able to deliver experiences for their customers that are so in tune with expectations that the vendor/customer dynamic achieves an almost emotional level.

It’s this ability to separate oneself from the competitive pack with truly exceptional experiences that has started to put business leaders in all markets on notice. Products and services may become commodities, but fully satisfying a customer’s expectations can build a more robust level of loyalty. So the next question is how do I get there and where do I start?

When implementing CEM it’s important to think beyond simply the products and technology that will be in play, and look at what your brand is trying to accomplish from a programme standpoint.

I like to look at programme development in 7 steps:

1. Business success modeling

What do you really want to accomplish with the programme?

2. Questionnaire development

What are the right questions to be asking to gather the right data to make informed decisions?

3. Data acquisition

Gather customer feedback through whatever channels or technologies are most appropriate.

4. Report delivery

Report on the initial findings as a first phase of analysis.

5. Solution identification

Perform a deep dive analysis of what drives loyalty to your brand, and what factors can be adjusted to improve on this.

6. Solution implementation

Put the improvement plan into action.

7. Brand advocate mobilisation

Enable your best fans to share their great experiences.

Seven steps to help uncover the formula for delivering exactly what your customers are looking for.

If I were a betting man, and Steve Wynn’s newest car indicates that I am, I would bet your organization is not extracting as much value as it could from your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

Too often businesses maintain an extremely narrow focus with their VoC efforts and utilize it purely for front-line performance management. While I would be the first to acquiesce that performance management should be a core tenet of VoC, I would also state that the program should be used for much more.

To give you a flavor of what I am talking about, ask yourself the following questions:

Does Your VoC Program Assist in Testing New Products?

A typical VoC program asks about how a business did today and omits the opportunity to gain insight into new products and services they could offer tomorrow. As a business leader, you should constantly be striving to learn and understand how your business could be adding more value to the lives of your customers. An easy way to begin this process is to simply ask your current customers a few different questions, such as:

• “How could (insert your company name) be adding more value?”
• “You currently use/have used our Product X. Are there any additional products or services we could offer to help you get more value out of Product X?”
• “Please rate your level of interest in purchasing Service X (a new product) from us.”

The questions above are purely intended to kick start the hamster on your ‘idea wheel’, not specific questions that accomplish what I am suggesting. Additionally, I am not insinuating that adding a few questions to a survey replaces your existing R&D and market research efforts. If you test the waters with your customers and ask them what they want in existing VOC channels, you could potentially spur more rapid innovation and significantly enhance your forward thinking efforts.

Does Your VOX Program Inform Customers of Feedback-inspired Changes?

It boggles my mind when I learn about organizations that make fabulous improvements in their products or services based on customer feedback, and they fail to communicate to their customers that this was based on their feedback. Tell customers when you change something as a result of their feedback!

I frequently get asked, “How can I improve my survey response rates?” A simple way to increase your survey response rates is to demonstrate to customers that you are actively using the data they provide. Too often customers think that their surveys go into the ether, and for most companies, survey results do go into a vacuum. Be bold, be different, and celebrate the hell out of customer feedback and what it is delivering to your business. Customers will respond by giving you more feedback.

• Put a brief prompt in your call center IVR telling customers what you did.
• Put up signage in your stores.
• At least do something!

Does Your VoC Program Understand the Context Behind Feedback?

Most often VoC program surveys will contain questions about individual employee or overall experience attributes. Such as:

• “Please rate the knowledge of the individual that assisted you.”
• “Did the associate take ownership of your issue?”

While those questions are good, unless you know the underlying customer perceptions and context of the response, the simple quantitative data they produce may be tough to coach on. For example, Mindshare met with a fashion retail organization that uses a knowledge rating question like the ones above. When we asked the VOC leadership team what ‘knowledge’ in bullet 1 referred to, and how they should coach their store associates on the scores, we received some very different answers. It means “knowledge of fashion trends” or “knowledge of the store’s inventory and product location” or even “knowledge of pricing” etc. All are “right”, but all have very different coaching steps and context associated with them.

If there was no alignment among the 4 people in the room, there was probably a disparity at the field and store management level as well. They needed to quickly get to the bottom of what type of ‘knowledge’ is most important to their customer base, and drive that out into their training programs. To accomplish this, we suggested an insertion of a ‘verbatim’ opportunity, an open-ended response where customers could describe what a ‘knowledgeable sales associate’ was to them. This question was live in their feedback system for a short period of time where Mindshare gathered massive amounts of data which we then utilized our comment analytics technology, and “Voila!” – Instant coaching bliss. They now understand exactly what ‘knowledge’ means to their key customers.

My point here is simple: make sure you understand the customer’s perception of any experiential attributes you are asking about in your VoC program. Without that underlying understanding, your coaching efforts could be a little off.

Continually Innovate on any VoC Program

This is just a sampling of some of the innovative things you can do with an existing VoC program. If you are only doing basic performance management, we need to talk—or talk to your current VoC Advisor, Evangelist, Guru, or whatever their title is—because you are not fully leveraging the power of your VoC program. You could also be leaving precious information and money on the table.

If implemented properly, these insights can be gained in very simple, tactical ways. You can potentially save your business massive amounts of money and provide the enterprise with phenomenal new data. You can avoid survey toxicity, enhance customer experiences, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Learn more how VoC can help you build a friendlier, more customer-friendly business with InMoment today.

Thanks to the internet and mobile technology, it’s become a lot easier to gather valuable feedback from a larger sample of customers. So does that mean that more indirect, “old school” methods like using mystery shoppers has become passé? Not necessarily – but it’s probably not the best method of gathering customer experience insights, especially if it’s the only solution you’re using.

While mystery shopping can still be a part of your customer experience management activities, it plays a supporting role as an auditing of minimum service standards. A trained mystery shopper can tell you whether or not a product or service is being sold in the way it was intended. Is the sales staff covering off key points when describing the product? How hard are they working to close the sale? Is it being displayed properly in the store?  What you won’t learn is how the customer feels about the actual product or the way it was presented to them. What’s more, mystery shopping isn’t overly cost efficient. For every one observation you get in a month, you can get 30 more from actual customers using customer feedback – and while you might be able to chalk up one bad mystery shopping experience to a bad day, it’s harder to argue with a multitude of real customers who feel your store isn’t living up to their expectations.

That’s not to say that mystery shopping can’t serve a purpose for you. You can still use it to provide an audit of your customer feedback efforts that will provide a better understanding of your customers, their expectations and their interactions with your brand.  A focused campaign of mystery shopping on underperforming locations can help uncover the tangible problems in that store or restaurant.

If it’s a true customer reflection you’re looking for, direct customer feedback can provide you with more relevant and more accurate “in the moment” information.  In fact, it’s become the method of choice for companies who are looking to understand the voice of their customers. And the ROI on listening to your real customers who are emotionally invested in your brand is far greater than feedback that comes from someone who’s paid to make observations on pre-determined criteria.

Mystery shopping has historically helped organizations understand the difference between good and bad – but only direct customer feedback allows you to understand great and striving to be great is the only thing that will transform your business.

Learn more about Customer Experience Management solutions.