Iceland Focuses Strategy Around Real Customer Feedback

Birmingham, UK – July 10, 2012 – Frozen food specialist Iceland has announced a new direction in their customer strategy focused on feedback from real consumers about their experiences with the retailer.

The ‘My Iceland’ programme, developed in partnership with customer experience management (CEM) experts Empathica, is designed to capture feedback from Iceland customers and identify issues that help the brand improve on key areas impacting their customer satisfaction and loyalty.

“We wanted to send a clear message to our customers that we’re here to listen to their feedback and exceed expectations when it comes to their Iceland experience,” said Iceland’s Retail Operations Manager Steve Pennington.

“The thinking behind the new programme came from wanting our customers to feel that Iceland is at the heart of their community and that we welcome their feedback to help us improve. It’s about moving past static measures of performance to a more dynamic, fluid strategy that gauges how real customers interact with and perceive our business.”

Laura Ellis, Trading Operations Manager at Iceland, added: “All the supermarkets are slashing their prices to encourage shoppers to shop with them. We already offer excellent value for money, and want to show our customers that they can get great value and excellent service every day at Iceland – that’s our point of difference.”

Running alongside their current mystery shopping initiative, the new programme assesses the customer experience in Iceland stores, as well as with their delivery service, and feeds the data back to location managers. The programme generates in excess of 1,000 customer responses per day across Iceland’s 750 UK stores, with the data then used to implement operational changes with store level employees that have an immediate impact on the company’s customer satisfaction levels.

Steve Pennington continued: “The new programme has also proven to be hugely motivating and empowering for our employees, as it allows customers to identify where they have received exceptional service and feedback to individual members of our team.  The Empathica system generates a customer ‘WOW’ and flags up the comment to the store manager, which has helped massively with getting buy-in from our store teams – the programme has quickly become part of the Iceland DNA.”

As part of the new initiative, Iceland has also implemented GoRecommend, a social media advocacy solution that amplifies the reach of real customer recommendations of their Iceland experience and products purchased, using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Pennington added: “The response we’ve had through using GoRecommend™ has been phenomenal. In the first week alone, we were able to amplify positive and personal customer comments to over 200,000 Facebook users, which has in turn resulted in a massive uplift in traffic to www.Iceland.co.uk. It’s fantastic that, at such an early stage in the programme, Empathica is helping to drive real change within the business.”

Gary Topiol, EMEA managing director for Empathica, commented: “We’re delighted to have successfully demonstrated how quickly a well executed CEM programme can deliver team engagement and actionable insights. The philosophy behind “My Iceland” is very inspirational and I am certain that the programme will enable Iceland to strengthen the “community feeling” and drive long term customer loyalty.”

About Iceland

Iceland is recognised as the leading innovator in frozen food in the UK, and its new products have won a series of industry awards since 2005. Iceland today has more than 750 mainly high street stores in the UK, led by and known for its own brand frozen food but also meeting customers’ everyday needs for competitively priced grocery and chilled food lines.

Iceland was named by the Sunday Times Best Companies survey as the Best Big Company to Work For in the UK in 2012, having first entered the survey in 14th place in 2009.
Iceland’s focus now is on continuing to grow its core business in the UK through product innovation and selective store expansion, while exploring opportunities for further development of its successful export business with partners overseas.