“Every store’s a snowflake”
One of my first ever TruRating conversations was with a lady at Starbucks HQ who said this – and educated me on the importance of understanding the individuality of each store. With different customers, each with their own needs, expectations, and behavior patterns – retailers should take a granular view of the experience within each store.
This struck a chord with me and influenced much of how we built TruRating.
Some very successful retailers (who are happy customers of ours) take this philosophy even further – empowering store managers to own the P&L, to decide on the product mix, the recruitment and store opening and closing times, etc. This is founded on the view that the store manager is the one on the ground closest to understanding the nuances of the customer base and is best to make these decisions.
Too often, Customer Experience strategies look at their customer base at a brand level and aggregate what customers are saying across all stores to an overarching view (usually because they simply don’t have the volume of feedback to attribute to a store). But we all know that our view of a brand is only as good as our last touchpoint with them – and for retail – circa 90% of those experiences happen within a store.
To create exceptional customer experience I strongly believe you have to start at grass roots – understanding that experience within each store, across each day. That is how you can act on feedback and drive change. Make those individual touchpoints with customers better and that will all bubble up to enhance your overall brand.
By allowing retailers to drill down into individual store performance on a single dashboard, I believe we’ve empowered them to truly grasp what’s working, what’s not, and why. This level of insight echoes my Dad’s wisdom in retail: “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”. Or, in our terms – take care of each store, and your brand will flourish.
About Author:
The seeds for TruRating were first sown when Georgina Nelson (TruRating’s CEO & Co-Founder) read Psychology at University. She became fascinated with how to measure, understand, and predict human behavior. The key to this quickly became apparent was data we could trust – and this required the right sample size, collected at the right time.
Nelson studied law and went on to work for Which?, the largest consumer association in Europe. Working with the EU and UK governments, she became a champion for consumer rights in the then-evolving online data and privacy space.
