Putting a Value to Customer Experience

While it’s easy to pay lip service to the importance of customer experience, for those in charge of CX initiatives or Voice of the Customer programs, proving the value of investing in Customer Experience to the wider business can be a challenge.  While a commitment to exceptional service values is commonplace, understanding what that means in a given context, at a given time, is not as simple as it might seem.

Strategic goals tend not to map neatly to the complexities of the retail environment and identifying which aspect of the in-store experience is actually impacting customer spend can be an incredibly complicated task.  When you add the hurdle of proving a quantifiable ROI to the mix, it’s not surprising that while many businesses are saying the right things, they’re not always able – or willing – to provide the support needed to see things through. 

TruRating works with retailers to help them understand – in plain and simple $ terms – which aspects of the Customer Experience are adding genuine value to their business and are therefore worth focusing on.  Here’s a recent example of how we helped one of our clients.

The Context

As part of their 2018 CX program, a national discount retailer wanted to test the introduction of specific service-focused staff across their stores. The purpose? To test whether the staff, known as Service Champions, would enhance CX in stores during the busiest hours and establish a business case for investing in additional training and resources across their entire store network.

As a retailer with a large and varied store footprint – from busy urban locations to remote mural stores – part of the challenge was establishing a fair measurement standard for each of their locations.  Previously used services such as mystery shopping had turned out to be inconsistent, while a receipt based survey program drew so little responses as to be essentially useless.

By asking simple, fast and anonymous feedback questions using the payment terminal itself, we knew we’d be able to gather a statistically relevant data sample in just a few weeks, so we came up with a plan.

Setting up an A/B Test

After meeting with the retailer, we established a selection of pilot stores from both rural and urban locations (to ensure a representative cross-section of their overall store network) and set out to run a simple A/B test approach.

Having identified our test stores, we implemented 3-service related custom questions we knew to be associated with a strong spend uplift.  These were selected to provide clear and measurable goals for the Service Champions and offer a clear way of seeing how impactful they’d be.

With custom questions in place, we established a baseline for performance by measuring TruRating scores and ATV across test control stores before and after Service Champion recruitment. The Service Champions were scheduled during the busiest shifts of the week – Thursday afternoon to Sunday mornings – to ensure that their impact on service would be truly tested.

The Results

In our post-trial analysis, we found that 75% of stores in the test group where Service Champions had been in place saw an increase in Average Transaction Values compared to previous periods.

The biggest impact occurred on the busy Friday afternoon shift when a 6% increase to average transaction value was measured. While the impact on spend for Friday and Saturday mornings was relatively low, these periods saw a much lower volume of transactions, helping the retailer to qualify that their greatest ROI would be during their busiest shopping periods.

As well as validating the impact of Service Champions on CX and average transaction value by the time of day, TruRating was able to identify differences in response by store type e.g. small-town stand-alone outlet vs urban shopping centre environment, providing a rich area for further segmentation analysis in the future.

By capturing thousands of responses from customers over the course of the trial period, accommodating for contextual analysis based on store size and location, this discount retailer was able to conduct a truly controlled experiment unaffected by external influences. In a short time, TruRating was able to quantify the impact of the Service Champion initiative, across multiple CX drivers, identifying clear ROI for both customer sentiment and spend.

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We’d love to hear from you too!  Get in touch with one of the team to find out how we can better help you implement your 2019 CX Initiatives at [email protected] or head straight to our business page to find out more today.

If you’d like to read more… 

Why not see check out how New Balance used TruRating to reinvent its store layouts here. 

For a more general introduction to the concept of Customer Experience, you can find the first in a series of posts on the subject here.