By Fatima Lora, Assistant Editor
Loving your customers is one thing, doing something about it, such as offering them a discount on their second purchase of a product or following up on a recent purchase, is another. This is one of the ways retailers can improve on the customer experience. And newsflash, customer experience isn’t something that happens in silos, so having ownership across the company is critical. This was the main topic in a book titled: Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business.
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The customer experience is, quite simply, how your customers perceive their every interaction with your company, as noted in the book. “It’s a fundamental business driver.”
“We didn’t want to write a book that cheerleads the concept of loving your customer,” said Harley Manning, VP and Research Director at Forrester Research and co-author, in a recent webinar. “Our readers are interested in how to be good at customer experience and how to improve.”
Manning advised store managers to make sure governance is a part of basic job responsibilities: “Have an overall strategy and assign responsibilities to employees, and be sure the employees follow through with the tasks.”
“Governance is a discipline most people roll their eyes about,” Manning explained. “There’s governance practice throughout companies. Whenever there’s something in your business that needs to be done at a specific time and in a specific way, that’s governance.”
Manning shared insights on governance from one of my favorite brands — LEGO: “One of the most important things that happened at LEGO was that now employees have specific roles,” Manning wrote. “Key people in the LEGO customer experience ecosystem, from marketing managers to the company’s external shipping partner, have specific customer experience responsibilities that are appropriate for their roles. These assigned responsibilities, combined with a robust process for making sure the tasks get done, enable the LEGO Company to manager its customer experience proactively.”
At Retail TouchPoints, we constantly hear that control has shifted to the consumer, and in many forms it has. However, retailers that are determined to create a compelling customer experience are winning in retail. For example, in many ways innovative technology is helping retailers address the showrooming challenge, however technology alone isn’t going to save a business if the store associates and managers do not know how to use those tools.
Gathering relevant data can help retailers better manage the outcome of the in-store customer experience. In the book, Manning outlined the three “flavors of customer experience metric” that retailers can adopt in order to evaluate the success of their strategies:
1) Perception metric: Tracking a scenario, such as waiting in line, and the customer’s perception of that experience;
2) Description metric: Operational data that describes what happened within the store or how long customers had to wait in line; and
3) Outcome metrics: Measuring the financial result of what happened, such as when the customer made the purchase.
“When you use a standard type of measurement, the advantage is that it allows you to compare your company to another using that specific type of measurement,” Manning discussed. “Which one you use isn’t that important, just don’t misuse the tool.”
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