As an executive of a multi-location  corporation,   you know the importance of excellent customer experience. Retaining current customer base is very important as the cost of acquiring new customer is very high.  As we know, customer loyalty is based on their past experience. Many domain experts agree that the current  challenge for the  corporations is in retaining customers and not as much on attracting new customers. However, are you getting high volume of quality feedback instantaneously to make such  executive decisions? Do you have a corporate guideline on the customer experience attributes and their minimum thresholds?  Does your current survey system allows creation of such a corporate goal on customer experience and the generation of visual experience map for quick corrective action?

Ineffective Feedback Capture

Most corporations these days have some customer feedback  capture (survey) program in place.   That includes feedback captured face to face, comment cards, email, online or phone.   Such feedback capture can be evaluated on three criteria – quality, volume and timeliness. Anonymity of the customer is very important.  Incentivizing the customers for their time should not be ignored either. The customer engagement should be made with customer comfort in mind. Let’s analyze each one of them.

Quality and Volume Matters

Customers will provide high quality and high volume feedback if survey taking is made easy, quick, exciting with customer comfort in mind. Most often surveys are created mindlessly without any respect for the customer’s time and comfort. There are cases where customers are asked to spend over  20 minutes of their time in filling out the survey. In some cases you need to remember details of your specific visit to start or complete the survey. Often customers need to remember the company name and go online to complete the survey. If you make the customer go through this tedious process, they will rush through the survey jeopardizing the quality. Low quality feedback is dangerous if it’s the basis of executive decisions. In order to assure that there is a real change in the quality of the customer experience large number of feedback samples have to be collected.

Delayed Feedback

Timeliness of the feedback is very important to correlate the event to the feedback metric. In most of the above approaches the feedback is not captured just after receiving the service. Take for example the comment card. It can be received after much delay or get lost. Email  and online events are generated after some time and responded to in unknown amount of delay.

Customer Anonymity

Studies have shown that anonymity  of the customer is required to guarantee a honest feedback from the customer.  If there is any chance of being able to trace back to the customer, customers will hesitate to provide honest comment or rating. This is true in the case of comment cards, emails and online surveys. How can you provide low ratings or comments for improvement on a comment card handed to you?

Online Rewards

Lately many retail stores offer rewards for completing the online survey. Some are fixed rewards, others offer random rewards. In most cases, the type of people such campaign attracts, and the quality of their feedback  is very questionable.

Dynamic Survey

Your survey should adapt based on the previous answers. Such function will allow skipping some questions or  finishing the survey quickly.  Such facility for survey  creation without the IT help every time will help build and modify  the survey quickly.

Question Categories

In order to probe the your  customer experience well, you need a broad category of questions types to choose from.  This allows you  build a flexible yet powerful  survey without requiring multiple or ineffective questions.

Tablet Based Solution

We suggest a solution based on pre-configured tablet that would just need powering up to land on the START button page of the current active survey. Customer should not be troubled with any data entry, just have them make selections. Such tablet would be presented at the end of the service when their experience is still fresh in their mind. Most customers would not like to be bothered with surveys once they leave the premise.  Again, with per-configured tablets there is no worrying about the hardware, the operating system or the downloads.

The power of instantaneous rewards cannot be over emphasized. Any survey that takes more than 10 to 20 seconds should provide some incentive to the customer. Tablet based system again offers a unique opportunity for instantaneous onsite random reward distribution. Random rewards will be announced during survey taking for collection at the end of the survey. This can create a great marketing buzz at a small cost.  Customers will be excited and feel well rewarded to spread the word.

Systematic Approach

Corporations would like a consistent systematic approach for managing their customer experience. In such case, the corporate quality goal can be used as the guideline to generate quality attributes. Questions can be created to address each quality attribute. Limits can be set for the rating values. Quality attribute values can be shown in color on a grid for quick visualization like in a weather map. Any deviation in rating from the corporate guideline would alert management to fix the exposed issues quickly.

Summary

Onsite tablet based feedback capture is a new approach with many advantages. Such an approach  captures  high  volume of quality  feedback  data  instantaneously.  High quality is assured as you have made it fun and improved your customer comfort level. Evaluating such an approach is quick and non-disruptive as no integration with corporate systems is required. Look for vendors that provide pre-configured tablets with automatic replacement warranty on monthly subscription. Such tablets will run your custom surveys across the locations activated from your portal. Absolute simplicity in usage can create great customer acceptance and eliminate the need for staff training. There are many functions that can be added to reduce customer monotony and increase their participation. Multi-location retail operations should create a corporate quality guideline to offer and maintain superior customer experience levels. In such a service level, the vendor would work with corporate executives to resolve actionable issues in a timely manner to keep the quality ratings within the desired levels.

The cost of  experience management system consists of cost of the tablet, managing the tablet, staff training, page creation and update – in other words the IT cost. The new Android tablets have brought the cost down. The IT operational cost can be kept low or non-existent if the system is well thought out and purpose built. On such a system management team should be able to type in the questions and review the results using very powerful built-in functions.

Such simplicity is very critical for high rate of adaption by the management team. For the management team, this represents an electronic survey card with all benefits of latest technologies. You also want to find vendors who offer no upfront cost subscription model, to avoid costs involved in sourcing, testing and managing of the tablets. Such system would provide pretested/pre-configured tablets which otherwise would again involve substantial IT operational cost and time. An absolutely simple to operate tablet would  land on the START button  page automatically on power up – this will avoid the need for any staff training.

How can you put a cost on a system that helps management with vital customer experience metrics instantly? However, the total cost of ownership of a well designed system should not  be more than few IT hours per month. Sometimes companies tend to believe that in-house solution can save them money. However in most cases they cannot keep up with the specialized vendors in innovations and reduced cost of R&D.

• Customer interaction has to be very simple and quick – no navigation or data entry
• The login management portal has to be absolutely simple to operate
• The tablet (device) has to be handed over at the end of service
• A random onsite rewards scheme to incentivize customers
• Automatic collecting of chronic issues for easy resolution by the management
• Captures comments that helps to showcase accolades
• Scales from one to thousands with the same ease