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How Fortnum & Mason uses real-time customer experience insight to improve in-store performance, coaching, and consistency.
You feel it, right? The current approach to customer feedback is fundamentally broken. You’re only hearing from your angriest, loudest customers. They’re making you chase after issues you can’t quantify. And after all that – these customers can still go online and trash your business. Whatever department you’re in – from ops to CX – it seems being customer-centric is a lot harder said than done.
In 2024 more and more CPG brands are looking to retail media networks to plug a gap in their advertising strategies. But as we explored in this blog on CPGs and retail media networks, retailers need to do better at delivering the right kind of data to their partner brands.
News flash: advertising is going through a difficult time right now. While it won’t come as news to CPG marketers that the old ways of reaching customers aren’t cutting it anymore, there’s reasons to be positive. And it’s all to do good-ol’ dependable bricks-and-mortar stores.  In our recent webinar with Bryan Gildenberg, of CPG Guys podcast fame, we broke down a few of the things shaking up retail advertising right now, as well as the benefits of retail media.
Retail media is having a moment. And according to a recent study by Insider Intelligence, physical stores are next frontier. Here’s the catch, though: while it’s easy-ish to quantify the ROI of digital advertising, to date it’s been almost impossible to understand the impact of in-store advertising.
When you decide to call your customers “guests”, you set the bar extremely high for customer experience. The Canadian grocer Longo’s uses TruRating to go above and beyond customer expectations. And it’s working: in 2024, it was named the #1 grocery store in Ontario by Leger WOW.
Apparel brands live and die on their ability to be agile - how fast they can get the right products to customers and deliver in-store experiences that keep people coming back.
"You are learning things when you study this granular behavior, that are often counterintuitive and really surprising," said Bryan Gildenberg, Former Chief Knowledge Officer at Kantar and The CPG Guys Podcast Host. "...having done a lot of in-store research in my life, you find this stuff all the time, but the ability to capture it in real-time is important."
Have you ever agreed to take part in a survey, feeling generous about sharing your feedback…and then many looooong boring minutes later found yourself wishing you hadn’t - perhaps ultimately walking away without completing the survey?  If so – you’re not alone.
Ah, the enigma that is Generation Z. Are they really so hard to decipher? And if so, why does it matter? Certainly, many retailers have spoken to us about the urgent need to connect with and engage the next generation. So what is it about “Zoomers” that makes this so challenging? For one, it’s clear from the research that there’s a real problem with pinning down Gen Z characteristics. It’s easy to rely on lazy assumptions and stereotypes about the TikTok generation –  “they’re digital natives, so of course they prefer to do all their shopping online”.
It’s been discussed time and time again - online reviews now play a huge part in consumer decision-making. And it’s well-known that fake reviews are a big problem (to the point where law-makers in the US are introducing legislation to combat the issue). Add in the fact that it’s usually the most disappointed or delighted customers that even trouble themselves to leave reviews, and you end up with a morass of unrepresentative feedback. 
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.

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We use TruRating to confirm what customers actually notice and respond to positively, which allows us to quickly roll out a plan based on real data. Then we can double down on what works across our stores.

ALDI

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“With other CX programmes, the stats never matched what we observe in store because of low response rates. With TruRating, the numbers make sense.”

JD Sports

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“TruRating provides a consistent, up-to-date view of performance across every channel, it brings our business together in a way no other tool has.”

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