Measure What Matters – let your customers tell you what’s important to them (and their wallet)
In the ever-evolving world of retail, success hinges on understanding and meeting customer expectations. Store Operations leaders are at the forefront of this pursuit of excellence. In this blog series we explore how top-performing retail brands are leveraging the power of customer feedback to provide vital, data-driven KPIs for their store teams.
We previously covered critical metrics for store teams and the importance of asking the right questions. Here we’ll look at how to ‘measure what matters’ most to customers – by ensuring there’s a built-in financial link to the customer responses.
Hypothesizing that certain interactions with the store teams will have an impact on customer buying behavior is one thing – and certainly a useful start. But in order to test that hypothesis, and then inform, monitor, and motivate store teams, the ability to demonstrate an ROI against that interaction is vital. It’s certainly how TruRating’s retailers have been able to pinpoint their highest priorities when it comes to staff KPIs, and given that 96% of CX executives have reported that they struggle to prove the ROI of their programs, the ability to link feedback with transaction data is clearly crucial for all facets of retail customer experience.
As a simple example, most of the store managers we work with know that greeting a customer as they enter the store is likely an important action for their staff to take. But with transaction data connected directly to the question: “Were you greeted when you came into the store today?”, they can not only prove to their teams exactly how important that single interaction is (and by the way, we see an average increase of over 20% in basket size when a customer answers ‘yes’ to that question), but they can continuously monitor performance via the constant stream of customer feedback – and identify coaching needs if and when positive responses start to fall off.
Customer feedback + financial link + VOLUME = a recipe for success
We work with retailers who now base store team KPIs directly on their customer feedback and communicate daily with staff about their performance. This means managers and head office can identify issues and act to fix them – before they begin to really impact sales.
The link to some sort of financial outcome (such as average transaction value) is what gives retailers the power to prioritize their store teams’ tasks and behaviors. However, in order to be truly data-driven when it comes to store team performance measurement, you also need enough volume of responses, per store, every day. This is how the retailers we work with obtain the granularity of data required to monitor performance at the store and shift level.
To discover more about how retailers are using customer feedback to make data-led decisions, prioritize key metrics, and continuously improve their customer journeys, download our latest guide for Store Operations. With a whole host of best practice examples and top tips based on feedback from half a billion customers, you can take the first step on your own Journey to Operational Excellence.
