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One of the biggest challenges to the retail industry is
finding out when something has gone wrong.
When customers complain you get
a chance to put things right and make sure it never happens
again. But research shows that you probably only hear from
about 5% of the customers who experience problems.
Very
often, customers who experience a problem in a retail
environment either don’t know where to complain, or they
simply don't want to create a fuss.
Obtaining actionable
customer feedback is even harder across a large chain of outlets or
in a franchise operation. Senior
management seldom has the luxury to monitor customer experience
at every outlet or branch. Mystery
shopping can help - but is often limited by infrequency
of visits and the sheer costs involved in inspecting and
reporting on every branch, several times a day.
CTMA has identified four significant
limitations that often arise with satisfaction
research, mystery shopping and interceptor surveys in the
retail industry:
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They often fail to
measure customer satisfaction and performance in terms
of strategic or financial outcomes. Remedial actions are
therefore often driven by anecdotal influences and
un-calibrated expressions of customer “importance”
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They seldom
identify where specific action needs to be taken and
typically result in general solutions, organisation-wide
initiatives and improvement initiatives with
unnecessarily high deployment costs
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They often fail
to identify what specific remedial action should be
taken to improve service. Opportunities for simple and
cost-effective improvements can therefore remain elusive
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They typically
fail to provide feedback often enough to
identify problems soon enough to take
appropriate action
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