The kids were barely back to school before the first ‘Celebrate Christmas for £9.99!’ posters started to appear, and with November now upon us, consumer appetite for all things festive is going to start accelerating.

The Christmas party market is currently believed to be worth around £1billion, so even in challenging financial times, there is a huge opportunity for operators with a strong offer. While competition is tougher than ever and the market is unlikely to grow this year, there is certainly a chance to increase market share.

For a customer experience management (CEM) professional like me, it’s not only this commercial potential that is exciting, but also the huge amounts of intelligence that will be collected over the Yuletide period, which will provide pointers for quick fixes this year, as well as more strategic planning for 2013.

A great CEM programme will deliver insight into which elements of hospitality have a link to customer loyalty and thereby repeat business. However, at Christmas, your regular guests might have a very different agenda from their regular visits and what is usually important may go out of the window.

• Food quality might not be as important as ‘ease of ordering’ for a party of disparate work colleagues who would never normally break bread together (I am not describing the Empathica Christmas party here…).
• Whoever is the office party organiser will want things to run smoothly and keeping it simple may well pay off.
• Budgets may be tight but a classic Christmas dinner with all the trimmings – and no washing up – could well be worth paying for.

Learning from past years across the sector, three interesting areas to monitor are:

1. Server attitude underpins the experience

You may have hired plenty of seasonal staff to support the rush, but if they are not happy dealing with customers, you may have made things worse, not better. How are you going to ensure that they are supported by experienced team members to deliver a level of service that is your customers expect?

2. Menu design can have unexpected effects

You have differentiated your brand’s Christmas dinner with a delicious chestnut stuffing, which people loved in your test kitchen. Have you tested it in a real kitchen? If not, are you sure that its unique preparation process won’t put the kibosh on everything else? We have seen organisations scrap dynamite new ideas after a couple of days because their service speed scores are so badly affected. Make sure you’re watching this closely.

3. The festive spirit

Even the most abstemious of us enjoy a drink at Christmas. Are your team switched on to taking the maximum number of drinks orders, and upselling? There are lots of people to serve, but taking the time to take a drinks round can make the difference between a good and bad office party, and future loyalty. And turning an order of a couple of bottles of wine into a couple of bottles of prosecco can make your guests’ evening and increase your take (done responsibly, of course). Have you got measures to enable you to monitor availability and upsell?

Over the 10 years working with leading global brands, we’ve learned that sometimes it’s executing the basics well that allows brands to break through to new levels of success. Here are some of the key lessons we’ve taken from our retail and hospitality programmes on improving customer experiences:

1. Customers are eager to connect with businesses they frequent

85% of consumers are willing to provide feedback to the retailers they frequent. The challenge is ensuring their feedback is acknowledged and acted upon. Sadly, the same study showed that only 29% believe this feedback is used to improve the customer experience.

2. Drive response rates to ensure an appropriate sample size

Insights are only as good as the data sample being analysed. While many customers will be proactive in providing feedback, some will need added incentives like discounts or a sweepstake entry.

3. Customers vary – so should feedback mechanisms they are offered

Whether it’s younger customers consolidating all their communication on a mobile device or an older person wanting to use a landline telephone, feedback programmes need to take into account customers’ technology preferences.

4. It is often the little things that define the best experiences

It’s often the subtle factors that lie just beneath the surface of the obvious drivers of satisfaction that separate merely good experiences from truly great ones. Understanding those is key to moving experiences from good to great.

5. A survey shouldn’t be an interrogation

Feedback starts with asking the right questions. The right questions should always be personal to both your brand and your customers. You need to focus on your own brand strengths and exploit competitors’ weaknesses.

6. Commitment and focus are the first steps in driving change

All employees of a brand need to be engaged and accountable. The real key is in changing the behaviour of front line staff to prioritise the areas that will have the most impact, focus on specific improvements and follow through with a tangible level of commitment.

7. Delivering great experiences is a marathon, not a sprint

It’s only with that consistency built up over the lifespan of the customer relationship can lasting loyalty be built – the type of loyalty that can translate into advocacy.

8. Brand insights can reveal the keys to future success

Customer feedback can serve to answer three basic questions: How are we performing as a brand in the eyes of our customers? What is broken or needs improvement in how we are executing? Where should we be headed next, to stay top of mind with customers?

9. Multiple channels, one experience

Brands must provide a consistent experience, delivering the same brand promise at each point of their customers’ journey. Feedback programmes can ensure each channel is consistent with the desired brand experience, enabling businesses to maintain a strong brand identity across what may be disparate parts of their operations.

10. Drive advocacy by engaging the social consumer

Once brands have invested in a customer experience management programme, it is important to convert loyal customers into brand advocates by making it easy for them to share their positive brand experiences via social media platforms.

In Summary

Customer feedback programmes have at their heart a simple goal – connecting brands with their customers whose support is their lifeblood. By opening up this vital channel of communication not only can brands get a view into how they are delivering in the eyes of their customers, but also unlock their own formula for ensuring they can sustain their success on an ongoing basis – at every location, in every department, on every shift.

The cooler autumn weather and the children returning to school signal one thing for many households in America… the return of NFL football.

It’s also around this time that many football fans begin to exhibit some interesting behavior. Premature championship celebration. After only a handful of games many fans are already preparing their Superbowl celebration party. However if there is one lesson I’ve learned as a lifelong football fan it’s that a handful of early season games is rarely a good predictor of the future. A full 16 game season can be long and it’s usually not the fast starting teams who win it all, but the most consistent.

The phenomena holds true when it comes to customer experience as well. Launching new products or seasonal marketing campaigns might prompt a temporary spike in great customer experiences for a retailer, but ultimately the best brands are the ones who are able to deliver on their promises day in and day out, from one location to another. Front line staff needs to be fully engaged and accountable each and every day to do so. Great store managers know this, and they understand that the real key to maintaining great experiences is in changing the staff behavior for the better. Behavior that drives exceptional in-store experiences are the catalyst for advocacy.

There’s a simple four step process to helping make this happen:

1. Start with helping location managers focus front line staff on specific areas that can have the biggest impact and doing so in a consistent manner.

Focusing on doing the right things shouldn’t be a onetime event, it needs to be an ongoing philosophy. One way to ensure ongoing improvement is to leverage the power of your own internal community through social sharing. Let location managers learn from each other, to provide support and best practices.

2. Create a program where you ask for commitment to making improvements.

Committing to those focus area improvements is a significant emotional step and encourages a more meaningful level of engagement for location managers with their customer experience programs. Commitment and engagement also provide a different kind of measurement for area and regional managers to have conversations with local managers about improvement rather than blame.

3. Once the commitment is made, then it’s all about driving actions.

Providing location managers with action plans to encourage the right behaviors at the right times for all their employees. These actions can be built from brand best practices, and they can be enhanced through the power of social sharing and the knowledge of other managers across the brand. This living library of actions ensures that local improvements aren’t a onetime activity but are an ongoing part of your brand’s culture.

4. On a regular basis location managers should have an opportunity to reflect back on what worked and what needed improvement for next time.

This ongoing cycle of action and review provides location managers a powerful tool to reflect back on what worked and what to focus on moving forward.

Whether the goal is to win the Superbowl or to build a winning retail brand, the key is consistency. While not every NFL team has access to the same player talent and fan base, all retail brands today have access to the modern tools and programs to ensure their front line staff is fully engaged and delivering every day.

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.

Figures have historically shown that September is a month when retailers should be drawing customers into stores, as parents hit the shops ahead of the new term. In September 2011, retail volumes grew 0.6 percent month on month due to back-to-school and university purchases (UK National Office of Statistics). It will be interesting to see if this year differs.

Traditionally, the back-to-school period is an opportunity for retailers to deliver great customer experiences at this rather unique time of year. The back-to-school shopping trip is laden with emotion – excitement, anxiety, pride, dread, resentment – and that is just the parents. Some consumers will be overwhelmed with the costs involved and desperate to bargain hunt, others will only settle for the very best for Little Johnny – or maybe Big Johnny as he prepares to leave home for the first time. Either way, shopping trolleys are likely to be laden and there is a real chance to maximise sales and score points with customers by understanding their needs and responding accordingly.

Unfortunately, getting it wrong will not only mean that sales opportunities are missed but there is also likely to be a negative effect on long term customer loyalty. I remember the ritual of visiting Woolworth’s every year – new shorts, new pencil case, new geometry set – that so easily couldn’t have been set if the first visit had been a negative one. And this loyalty doesn’t just apply to the traditional stationery shop any more: the 357,915 new undergraduates (UCAS) this year will be requiring bedding, kitchen utensils, food, clothing, white goods, brown goods, computers, etc. The ritual is hard to break once formed, and highly valuable.

Starting infants’ school, moving to senior school and leaving home for university are all massive rites of passage with all elements of the process being inevitably relayed to friends and family in minute detail – online and offline. This could be a great marketing opportunity or a customer relations disaster! On a positive note, we know that 69 percent of consumers are willing to share great experiences (Empathica Consumer Insights 2011).

Our advice to retailers is pretty straightforward. The critical factors at this time of year are not that different to other times. Ensure staff are empowered and educated enough to provide advice as well as to man tills and to order sufficient stock levels for key products; prevent long queues forming and keep stocked up in core mandatory items. The key difference is that at this time of year the emotional resonance is turned up to 11 – making any let down much more impactful!

Whatever happens in reality this September, the critical discipline is to measure customer satisfaction alongside sales: not just how you perform against a checklist of standards, but how your customers feel. This will enable retailers to understand what really affects consumer behaviour in this very specific annual spending window which will allow better planning next year – and regardless of weather, or any other variable, September 2013 will again bring back-to-school fever.

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?