Serve customers anywhere – how new technology enhances Customer Experience

Posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 by Brennan Wilkie

A colleague of mine recently sent over this article from Stores magazine. In the article, the author discusses how retail brands are increasingly using new technologies such as smartphones, QR codes and social media to enhance their operations. One area of store operations where I see these technologies playing an increasingly important role is in customer experience management programs.

Rising smartphone usage and the continued growth of social media as the new standard methods of communication for consumers are changing more than just the gadgets people carry in their pockets. They are creating new patterns of behavior and in some ways changing what consumers expect from the retailers they frequent.

The world of retail has become immediate and mobile. Consumers not only have the option to purchase goods online, but even when in-store they have instant access to hundreds of product reviews and to their own personal networks if a product reference is ever required. This easy access to information has shifted the balance of power in the consumer-retailer relationship.

This new reality creates a big challenge for retailers, and for many a renewed focus on the in-store experience they deliver.

These experiences have always been influenced through some type of customer feedback. For many years brands have used customer feedback, rather than relying on intuition, to take an objective approach to evaluating how they do business.

Customer experience management programs were a natural step beyond the early mystery shopping programs. CEM took the limited set of anecdotal feedback provided by mystery shoppers and improved on it with technology and a broader set of data to pull insights from. Likewise, incorporating smartphones and social media can also play a role in continuing to evolve CEM programs. We call this marriage of existing CEM capabilities with these new technologies “Social CEM”.

QR codes and mobile surveys allow consumers and retailers alike an immediate channel for feedback – why not provide your thoughts at the immediate moment of truth rather than after the point of sale? Feedback captured during the shopping experience not only enhances the pool of feedback data but can help gather insights that may have been lost in transition through existing online surveys, such as feedback from customers who don’t buy. More importantly, this real-time feedback takes the one-way communication of customer surveys and brings them one step closer to being an active dialog.

Social media can play a role as well. Social networks provide both a new source for free form feedback and also provide a channel for the happiest customers, active advocates, to broadcast their great brand experiences to their networks. Active advocacy takes online reviews to their logical next step – targeted recommendations.

So the lesson for retailers is to embrace change. Acknowledge new consumer behaviors and new technologies and use them as tools to potentially enhance the way you do business.

This entry was posted in What do I Need to Consider When Choosing a Vendor? and tagged active advocacy, advocacy, Advocates, CEM, customer experience, customer experience management, customer feedback, QR Codes, Retail, Social CEM, social media. Bookmark the permalink.