Thought Leadership

The inexorable rise of mobile technology continues to shape the way we shop, dine out and use our leisure time. According to the latest figures from e-tail industry body IMRG and advisory firm Capgemini, while total online sales rose 18% year-on-year in December to £11.1bn, sales via mobile devices doubled to £3bn. Indeed, mobiles and tablet computers are now used for nearly 6% of all retail sales as Brits embrace shopping anytime, anywhere.

This trend presents both a challenge and an opportunity for brands in the eating and drinking out sector. With consumers increasingly carrying the technology around in their pockets, brands also have the opportunity to communicate with customers more frequently, and savvy brands are using technology to improve their guests’ experience.

Tablets are a driving force behind innovations in the front-end restaurant customer experience, whether in a quick service or a fast casual establishment. As more and more restaurants embrace tablet technology, there are several ways that they are revolutionizing the restaurant experience for brands and consumers.

1. Seamless Dining Experiences

Inspired by the ease of exceptional online buying events, guests value restaurants that provide seamless, hassle-free experiences from the moment they are seated through to the moment they pay. In many cases, restaurants are using tablets to offer table-side payment or other activities that streamline and improve the guest’s dining experience.

2. Cut the Queues

Fast food restaurants are using tablets to speed up the food ordering process and cut down on waiting time for customers. Orders can be taken from queuing customers on a wireless tablet to be ready for quick collection and payment at the counter, thus creating a positive brand experience.

3. Enhanced Interaction

Opportunities for enhanced interaction are prime targets for restaurants interested in improving customer experiences with tablet technology. Restaurants on the leading edge of tablet deployments have installed tablets at tables, allowing guests to interact with menus, place orders, pay bills and perform a range of other self-serve functions. Similarly, restaurants are exploring the use of promotional content or pay-as-you-go games that provide entertainment or customer engagement opportunities while guests wait for their food to arrive. These kinds of activities drive bottom-line improvements by leveraging customer experiences to increase loyalty.

4. “On the Fly” Data Insights

Tablets offer a non-threatening and engaging resource that restaurants can use to capture customer insights. While many guests are hesitant to provide personal information when they pay their bills or at the request of their servers, they are less resistant to providing data on their own terms, especially if the submission of data is tied to a discount or contest. Multi-site restaurants can leverage tablets to capture data insights at the local level, helping them tailor the customer experience to the desires and preferences of local consumers.

5. Guest Reviews

A great time to capture guest reviews is before they leave the restaurant, while details of the experience are top of mind. Willingness to provide feedback is also much greater with this immediacy, since even the most satisfied guests often don’t feel compelled to rate their experience later. In the restaurant industry, reviews are a key element in customer acquisition, and table-side tablets offer a ready-made resource for encouraging guests to share feedback about service, cuisine or other aspects of their experience. Reviews captured via tablets can then be used to build brand reputation and modify the customer experience based on guests’ suggestions.

6. Multichannel Feedback

Consumers use many different touch points to connect with the restaurant brands that are important to them. Surveys and other tools delivered on tablet devices create feedback that can be shared across all available channels, increasing the impact of brand advocacy and positive mentions. In particular, restaurants need to prioritize the use of tablets to capture feedback that can be distributed via social channels.

7. Enhanced Employee Engagement

One of the largest challenges with customer feedback is how to use the results when they arrive. Tablets can help to reshape this challenge by bringing results to life in a meaningful way to customer facing staff. Data visualization capabilities on tablets are extensive, but again the challenge is more than simply presenting guest feedback in a “pretty” way; it’s presenting it in a meaningful way that motivates staff and will drive guest experience improvement.

The real innovation in the use of tablet technology is that it enables restaurant brands to forge meaningful, direct connections among guests, restaurant managers and their staff. The deployment of table-side tablets gives guests more immediate options, inviting them to participate in activities that strengthen their relationship with the brand.

Just as importantly, tablets can significantly improve a restaurant’s ability to capture feedback and provide local guest insights—important factors in the brand’s ability to create and deliver enhanced customer experiences.

Omnichannel has become more than just a buzzword—it’s a reality for aggressive retailers interested in creating brand differentiation through a seamless shopping experience across all channels and touchpoints. As retailers all over the world sort through the organizational, operational, and technological challenges associated with the omnichannel experience, consumers add their own layer of complexity to the mix à la brand engagement and loyalty.

Today’s shopper wants the full “shoppertainment” experience: an in-store experience that provides them not only with the products they are searching for, but also an environment that is visually stimulating with a first-class customer service experience. Here are four ways retailers are creating the exciting and engaging in-store experience consumers are looking for:

1. Creating an Entertainment Destination

Retailers are starting to make space in their stores for new experiences that entertain and draw customers in. Many are creating relevant digital content that drives sales, presenting it on large screens and interactive in-store displays. A good example of this is Burberry’s London store, which transforms into an entertainment destination every season, presenting their latest collection through catwalks showcased on big screens and enabling customers to order products using an iPad.

2. Learning & Community Events

Increasingly, retailers are leveraging their stores to conduct educational and community-style events that allow customers to engage with the brand as well as other customers. A good example of this is Home Depot, which holds in-store workshops that teach weekend do-it-yourselfers how to complete home renovation projects on their own.

3. Offering New Services

Lifestyle cafes, spas, and salons are just some of the in-store services now used by retailers to drive increased foot traffic and keep customers in their stores longer. Leading grocery retailer, Tesco, has become the number one grocery brand in Korea by offering a virtual store in the subway system that allows commuters to order their groceries from a wall while waiting for their train.

4. Creating a Personalized Experience

Fashion retailers have a great opportunity to elevate the in-store shopping experience by implementing kiosks that allow customers to get recommendations on clothing suitable to their particular figure, and magic mirrors that allow shoppers to try on one garment and see how it would look on them in other styles and colors. In some cases, retailers are enabling customers to share the outfits they’re trying on via their social networks for instant feedback from friends and family. General Pants Co. in Australia introduced this late last fall in their stores, along with a program that allows customers to select the music they hear during their shopping experience and the ability to see trends featuring the brand’s latest clothing and accessories.

Through imaginative uses of current technology, there are endless ways you can create unique in-store customer experiences that engage and entertain. What is your retail brand doing to go beyond the omnichannel experience?

Robust social advocacy is an important goal for all restaurants, and it’s especially important in the highly competitive Quick Service Restaurant sector, where social advocacy can heavily impact brand loyalty and other variables that directly influence the brand’s bottom line.

Our 2013 QSR Benchmark Study showed that, not surprisingly, highly satisfied guests make a return visit much more frequently than their less satisfied counterparts. In fact, the likelihood of a return visit increased from 20% to 81% when customers reported a higher satisfaction rate. Those satisfied guests were also four times more likely to recommend the restaurant to friends, family, or colleagues.

As social media becomes a primary outlet for consumers to talk about their experiences with the brands they select, QSRs that proactively engage with their customers, across a range of social media outlets, will convert guests into passionate brand advocates. With the right strategy, social advocacy has the potential to help QSRs enhance the quality of the guest experience and increase loyalty by improving guest satisfaction.

Here are some top social advocacy tips to help your QSR create advocates in an environment where consumers are increasingly influenced by social media:

Guest reviews are a foundational element of social advocacy. But here’s the catch: the best time to capture a review can be before the guest leaves the restaurant. It’s important to encourage immediate reviews on smartphones using “voice of the guest” and social media advocacy solutions.

Guest-generated images have two purposes. By encouraging guests to capture and distribute images of dining events, also known as “foodstagramming,” you can create opportunities for the social sharing of positive brand experiences. In some cases, negative shared images can even become catalysts for improvement in the guest experience.

Sneak peeks are a great way to engage consumers and generate new social advocates. For example, when Taco Bell used SnapChat last year to reveal its new Beefy Crunch Burrito, fans were motivated to engage with the brand’s social community and to act as social advocates in their circles of influence. Your QSR brand can use the same tactics to improve satisfaction by motivating guests to participate in social communities around new menu items.

Contests and promotions are another area in which QSRs can improve guest satisfaction and increase social advocacy. If it’s done strategically, a contest or promotion can use social networks to create enthusiasm and excitement in online communities—deepening guests’ connection to the brand and distributing positive brand messages to large, online audiences.

Technology can also play an important role in improving social advocacy. By implementing a first-rate social media advocacy solution, your brand may be able to streamline the process of identifying social advocates and amplifying their messages across a range of social channels.

There is a big opportunity for QSRs to take advantage of their satisfied guests in the social sphere and extend customer delight beyond merely delivering a good product to encompassing the entire guest experience. By embracing consumer trends in mobile and social, brands can take advantage of their most valuable asset: their advocates.

A Brief Mobile History

Smartphones and tablets have been around for less than a decade, yet both technologies have been adopted faster than any other technology in our world’s history. In 2006, global smartphone penetration reached 5%, but by the end of 2013, this percentage rose to 22%—an increase in 1.3 billion smartphone owners.

Tablets have penetrated the world population at an even more impressive pace and matched the level of smartphone adoption and usage in a mere two years.

The Mobile-Optimization Movement

Mobile device technology continues to advance and be adopted worldwide, which creates an empowered consumer phenomenon—one that enables consumers to shop online, compare brands and prices, read reviews and feedback, and share customer experiences using social media and online review sites.

With increasing consumer dependency on mobile devices to obtain and share information, brands are beginning to look at new and innovative ways to engage with their customers using these technologies. This includes creating a mobile-optimized customer feedback survey for their Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

People Prefer Proximity

Mindshare performed a study recently to better understand customer survey completion rates on mobile devices versus desktop computers. Shockingly, we discovered that surveys taken on mobile devices took 30 seconds longer to finish on average, yet their completion rates were 5% higher. This leads us to believe that customers are willing to spend a bit more time to take surveys using a more proximate and immediate channel.

Mobile-optimized surveys that complement the devices they’re viewed on promote customer responsiveness and result in higher survey completion rates. Higher completion rates lead to greater customer feedback insights. Greater customer insights drive necessary operational improvements at both the brand and location level.

It’s a process. But a process that results in exceptional customer experience and your brand beating out the competition.

Make the Move to Mobile

When it comes to online surveys and the rapid adoption of mobile technology, ignoring optimization is not an option.

Like most people, as a new year begins I like to reflect on the previous year and think about how this year will be different from the last. As I think about 2013 and what it meant for the Voice of Customer industry, one thing is very clear to me: It was undoubtedly the Year of the Customer for retail brands—customer experiences have become more important than ever.

Motivated by an increasingly sophisticated range of online and offline shopping opportunities, consumers were eager to be delighted by retailers in ways that improve the quality of shopping events and their relationships with their favorite retail brands.

As we enter 2014, the push for truly remarkable customer experiences will become even more intense. In most cases, the retailers that rise above the marketplace will be those that are adept at capturing multichannel customer feedback and converting it into meaningful customer experience improvements.

For today’s retail brands, successful customer experience efforts aren’t limited to reacting to the comments and complaints of individual shoppers. The aggregation of feedback from many different sources offers proactive insights for targeting multiple dimensions of the customer experience.

With that in mind, there are at least four trends that will help shape the retail customer experience in 2014:

1. Omnichannel Feedback Integration

Savvy retailers are recognizing the problem with siloed feedback. When feedback collected from offline and online sources is treated independently, consumer insights are disconnected, causing the customer experience to become disjointed.

Retailers are quickly moving toward the consolidation of feedback from multiple, disparate sources into unified customer insights. By bringing together feedback from all available sources, retailers are better able to achieve a single view of the customer—and are better equipped to implement customer experience improvements that dazzle consumers.

2. Combining Solicited & Unsolicited Feedback

With good reason, retailers have given top priority to their solicited feedback, such as customer surveys and call center data, when making customer experience improvements. Yet, this feedback can be improved. By adding in unsolicited customer feedback, you may be able identify new insights into creating world-class customer experiences.

In retail, unsolicited feedback usually comes in the form of product reviews, social media mentions and other user-generated content that directly influences consumer buying decisions. This year, retailers will continue to invest in technologies and strategies that combine unsolicited and solicited feedback insights to improve the consistency of the customer experience.

3. Evaluating Branded Behaviors

It’s no secret that effective retail isn’t just about product quality anymore. Many retailers are also selling services and atmospheres that elicit emotional responses from consumers, making them feel happier, healthier, or more attractive.

In 2014, many retailers will invest in technologies that enable them to quantify these feelings and incorporate branded behavioral data into their brands’ Voice of the Customer (VoC) strategies. With these technologies, retailers will gain important insights that allow them to reinforce and validate branded behaviors, or point to customer experience changes that will amplify desired feelings and sentiments.

4. Big Data

Big Data is still a big story in retail. Although data captured from exceptionally large and diverse data sets has the potential to deliver important insights related to the customer experience, the use of Big Data to create customer experience improvements at the local level has been limited, at best.

Why? In many cases, it’s because local store managers simply lack the time and ability to distill Big Data into actionable customer experience insights. By using data visualization technology to convert their most complex data into simple stories, retail brands can now quickly relay big insights throughout their organization to instruct and unify.

Across the board, retailers that continue to place emphasis on being customer-focused and recognize the value of feedback and data from all channels and sources will have the advantage in creating exceptional customer experiences and capturing more than their fair share of the retail marketplace.

As I think about 2013 and what it meant for the Voice of Customer industry, one thing is very clear to me: It was undoubtedly the Year of the Customer for food service providers—the experiences of their guests have become more important than ever. Consumers were eager to be delighted by the establishments they chose in ways that improve the quality of their dining events and their relationships with their favourite restaurant brands.

As we enter 2014, the push for truly remarkable guest experiences will become even more intense. In most cases, the food service providers that rise above the marketplace will be those that are adept at capturing integrated guest feedback and converting it into meaningful guest experience improvements.

For today’s food service providers, successful guest experience efforts aren’t limited to reacting to the comments and complaints of individual diners. The aggregation of feedback from many different sources offers proactive insights for targeting multiple dimensions of the guest experience.

With that in mind, there are at least four trends that will help shape the guest experience in 2014:

1. Feedback Integration

Savvy restaurateurs are recognizing the problem with siloed feedback. When feedback collected from offline and online sources are treated independently, consumer insights are disconnected, causing the guest experience to become disjointed.

Food service providers are quickly moving toward the consolidation of feedback from multiple, disparate sources into unified customer insights. By bringing together feedback from all available sources, food service providers are better able to achieve a single view of the customer—and are better equipped to implement customer experience improvements that dazzle their guests.

2. Combining Solicited & Unsolicited Feedback

With good reason, restaurateurs have given top priority to their solicited feedback (via customer surveys) when making customer experience improvements. Yet, this feedback can be improved. By adding in unsolicited customer feedback, you may be able to identify new insights into creating world-class customer experiences.

In the food service industry, unsolicited feedback usually comes in the form of restaurant reviews, social media mentions and other user-generated content that directly influences consumer dining decisions. This year, restaurateurs will continue to invest in technologies and strategies that combine unsolicited and solicited feedback insights to improve the consistency of the customer experience.

3. Evaluating Branded Behaviors

It’s no secret that food and service quality are no longer enough when it comes to the guest experience. Many food service providers are also placing emphasis on the atmosphere of their establishments and designing them to elicit emotional responses from guests.

In 2014, many food service brands will invest in technologies that enable them to quantify these feelings and incorporate branded behavioral data into their brands’ Voice of Customer (VoC) strategies. With these technologies, restaurateurs will gain important insights that allow them to reinforce and validate branded behaviors, or point to customer experience changes that will amplify desired feelings and sentiments.

4. Big Data

Big data is still a big story in the restaurant biz. Although data captured from exceptionally large and diverse data sets has the potential to deliver important insights related to the guest experience, the use of big data to create guest experience improvements at the local level has been limited, at best.

Why? In many cases, it’s because location managers simply lack the time and ability to distill big data into actionable guest experience insights. By using data visualization technology to convert their most complex data into simple stories, food service brands can now quickly relay big insights throughout their organization to instruct and unify.

Across the board, food service providers that continue to place emphasis on being guest-focused and recognize the value of feedback and data from all channels and sources will have the advantage in creating exceptional guest experiences and capturing more than their fair share of the dining marketplace.

Consistent delivery of a great customer experience in a multi-market, multi-cultural environment is a multi-faceted challenge. The specifics that define a great customer experience vary by country; but universally, when customers are delighted, they increasingly return, become brand loyalists and tell their friends, colleagues and families.

With over 11 years’ experience working with leading global brands, Empathica (a Mindshare Technologies Company) has identified the core elements of successful international Customer Experience Management (CEM) programmes that drive business improvement and customer loyalty. Here I share some of the key lessons we’ve learned to help you to prepare a successful CEM programme to deliver great cross border customer experiences:

1. Recognise that global brands are delivered locally

Even if the brand is global in its appeal, customers experience that brand differently from country to country. Service expectations between cultures and markets are different; behaviour standards that may make sense in head office may be ineffective (or even insulting) in other markets around the world. For example, mandating an American-style hearty hello to dining guests as they enter a restaurant might feel forced and inappropriate in other, more restrained countries.
It is crucial to listen to the local markets and their expectations, because even the best locally-adapted product can be damaged if delivered in context of a poor overall experience.  And that impacts the global brand.

2. Build the optimal programme under the opportunities and challenges of each market

To manage a business globally, being able to compare performance across locations and countries is crucial. But some businesses make a mistake in trying to make all things the same. In global CEM, there are multiple layers of challenges – from differences in technological capabilities and readiness to adopt customer experience strategies to cultural restrictions.

At Empathica, we assess market readiness carefully in designing a global programme.  What is crucial to the programme design is to understand what drives successful adoption within the particular brand and build on the type of introduction that works in that business.

3. Design the programme to be culturally relevant across all markets

CEM programmes need to be as sensitive to local markets as the service delivery is. For example, the method of invitation and the incentive for participation offered are crucial components in engaging each market. One way to maximise the programme’s consistency is to strive for functional equivalency – keep to a core design that ‘flexes’ to respond to local market requirements.

In order to manage business globally, comparisons across markets have to be meaningful. Research-driven global insights and measurement of global progress require a consistent framework to assess change. In order to provide that consistent core, we design multi-market programmes to be ‘functionally equivalent’ because sometimes the best of intentions can go awry. Consistent research methodology would require that all markets use the same incentive for participation. But what might encourage customer engagement in one market might drive discomfort in another. To maintain cultural relevance, you may need to adjust the programme design when necessary. In those cases, offering a similar, but not necessarily identical, incentive can help the programme thrive.

4. Translations are just the beginning of localisation

It is essential to engage your customers in the language of the location – don’t just translate the right words, use the right tone. And it’s not just the words and tone that you need to consider.  The cultural impact on scoring patterns is a much researched topic and one of subtle complexity. On a 5-point scale – with 5 being the best score, does a 4 mean the same thing in Germany, Japan and Mexico? Unlike in the UK, German schools use a rating system in which a 1 is best score, but a score of 5 would be near failing. It’s just as easy to invert the scale in the markets like Germany for whom a 1 is the highest performance. It’s knowing where changes like that need to happen that is crucial to the programme’s success.

5. Remember it’s not about the number

Once you’re using the right scales, how do you drive improvement? Many businesses want to set a single, global target; but the reality is that goal may be simply out of reach for markets that are ‘hard raters’. The meaningful comparison typically is not the score but the improvement ratio. By targeting a level of improvement (e.g. all markets are expected to improve 6 percentage points in the next year or to outperform the local competitive set), each market can identify ways to drive their improvement within the relevant context.

Taking a Closer Look at the Latest Government Measure to Improve NHS service delivery

Rising demand for public services, changing population demographics and tightened budgets have transformed the environment in which the public sector operates. The need for a leaner, more efficient public sector means reform is high on the Coalition Government’s agenda. The introduction of the NHS Friends and Family Test earlier this year is the latest example of the increasing emphasis on making public services across the board more customer orientated.

All acute NHS Trusts are now required to ask both inpatients and Emergency Department patients one standard question known as the Friends and Family Test (FFT). The test asks: “How likely are you to recommend us to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?” It aims to encourage patient feedback, show patients that their views and experiences matter to the NHS, and improve patient care.

The idea behind the Friends and Family Test — that of providing a simple measure of patient satisfaction across all UK healthcare organisations — is a good one. It is right that healthcare provision should be designed around patients’ needs. Patient feedback provides a great basis to drive improvements. However, collecting robust, comparable data to even a simple question can be harder than it looks.

The government has set a target of a minimum 15% response rate, but this is not yet being achieved by all hospitals required to participate. Even where organisations are achieving the minimum percentage response rate, the actual numbers of patient responses remains very low in some cases. The Department of Health issued response numbers alongside scores earlier this month; however, the point of needing robust response levels was lost in some of the news headlines surrounding this first wave release of FFT scores.

To achieve measures that bear comparison across locations it is essential that, in addition to having a robust sample in every location, the method of measurement is identical too. However, the methodologies being used by different hospitals to conduct the Friends and Family Test vary widely. Methods in use for the test include paper surveys before patients have left the premises, kiosks which could be used by non-patients, issuing voting tokens for patients to post in a box, and more robust methods of collecting the data once the patient has reached home.

These factors mean the data currently being captured is not statistically robust in every case and therefore ‘league table’ style scoring comparing healthcare providers across the UK could be misleading.

While it is still early days for the Friends and Family Test, healthcare trusts striving for increased patient insight in order to improve their service can learn a lot from savvy private businesses, such as retailers and major hospitality brand owners, who are using technology to further exploit the talents of their workforce and build an emotional connection to customers.

Hospital Trusts are mandated to ask just one question. Retailers have learnt that asking the right series of questions allows them to understand how they are doing in looking after their customers across a range of elements that add up to the perfect customer experience. One question gives you a top line measure; the right set of questions allows you to understand how you are doing on the underlying drivers of great experience (why the patient feels and scores like they do) so you can focus your limited resources on making the improvements that will make the most difference to your patients or customers.

The mystery of your customer is being solved in pieces.
It’s time to put those pieces together.

Data Divided

Because businesses are divided into departments, so is business data. Although more and more companies are figuring out how to use analytics technology to understand their data, they continue to do it in silos. One team analyzes customer experience data, another team analyzes transactional data, and yet another analyzes operational data.

The Silhouette Method

This is like having each department cast their own light on your customer and learn from the shadow it produces. The basic shape and size of the customer can be obtained from this “silhouette” method, and these individual dimensions can be useful for providing direction to decision makers. Simple, department-specific insights are a good start, but adding more dimensions to your customer view is critical to future success.

For example, using customer survey data alone, your company can build out a strong plan for improving customer service and increasing customer satisfaction. The benefits of department-specific plans like this are real and important, and each department can do something similar.

This helps companies progress via smaller, department-specific strides.

Adding Dimensions

To perform like a top brand—and to gain every advantage you can—departments must stretch beyond their own data. Customer experience leaders shouldn’t just be able to measure and improve the customer experience within survey results—they should be able to quantify the experience-related impact on multiple facets of the business.
Some quick examples:

Reduced Operational Costs

• Storefront/Retail: Integrate payroll, real estate, transactional, and VoC data to identify whether the extra staffing you are throwing at a particular store—or store type—is, in fact, translating into a better customer experience or better sales.
• Contact Center: Integrate service levels, hold times, and VoC data to identify whether or not there is a positive impact from staffing up to meeting stricter service levels. If there is no incremental improvement in the customer experience, you are wasting money.

Revenue Generation

Integrate customer segmentation, product, and VoC data to better understand the experiences of your different customer segments. If you find that particular segments are responding better than others to certain services or products, take that data to your marketing partners and launch a more targeted campaign to increase the penetration of those services/products within the most receptive customer segments.

These examples illustrate very simple, but powerful, relationships between multiple data sets. When combined, they can drive improved customer experiences, along with strong business results.
Lead your business out of the shadows and step into the 3D world. Modern display optics have changed. Technology has moved beyond shining a light and casting a shadow, and the same needs to happen with customer experience–related insights and analytics. Today’s most advanced displays rely on a series of lasers and lenses to produce a highly detailed holographic image. That’s essentially what broader data integration does for your company.
By focusing the light of each department and combining compartmentalized data into a common analytics with holistic data visualizations, you will begin to see a more lifelike image of your customer.

Opportunity for Advantage

Today, very few companies are analyzing their data holistically and simultaneously. The opportunity and true potential of analytics technology lies in the integration of multiple streams—customer feedback data, operational data, segmentation, transactional data, etc.—to gain deeper operational insights, incremental gains in ROI, as well as more predictive measurements from the perspective of both action and inaction.

Action, This Day!

The quality of analysis and insights available to companies is not limited by technology. It is limited by data. If you can bring the data together, the insights are yours to use. So do it. This blog post is a call to action. Better yet, this is a flat-out plea to businesses out there in Business Land that are limiting their competitive advantage by maintaining siloed data and analytics.

Step up and start using your data the way it can—and should—be used. Mindshare’s Analytics Team is here to help.

We’re living in an age of massive change.

The word “recession” has gone from describing a quarter over quarter decline in GDP to describing the “new normal” ongoing economic outlook.

At the same time, a group of new technologies has gone from novelty to pervasive in the blink of an eye. It was only a few years ago that the original blue Blackberries were the symbol of being a high powered executive. Today everyone from teenagers to seniors are lining up to get their hands on the latest iPhone or Android devices. How everyday people are using these devices to connect and communicate has also gone through a massive change. Facebook has in just a few years gone from a novelty for college kids, to a Hollywood blockbuster, and has now amassed a user base exceeding 1 billion people.

These trends have left many brands reeling.

In fact, the past few years has even seen the demise of some of the most storied brands in business. Changing consumer sentiment and a challenging economy has in some cases caused core customer bases to drift away.

A term that’s emerged to describe this phenomenon is “digital Darwinism”; an age where technology and society have been evolving too quickly for some brands to adapt. The list of casualties is an impressive one. Borders, Blockbuster, Polaroid, Kodak, HMV and others have been unable to keep pace with rapidly changing consumer behaviors and expectations.

An argument could be made that the inability to keep up with drifting customer needs could have been avoided with an increased focus on keeping current with customer sentiment. Dealing with that particular challenge has always been the core objective of any customer feedback program.

However, customer feedback programs themselves must evolve also.

Lead the conversation…

Surveys will always be a key touch point for soliciting feedback from customers.

When it comes to surveys, the feedback you get from customers is only ever as valuable as the questions you ask them. The challenge with gathering the right kinds of data and insights from customer feedback is asking the right questions in the first place. Subtle changes in wording and structure can have a big impact, especially when it comes to driving the focused actions and behaviors that lead to a great customer experience. Often this requires going beyond generic functional questions to more nuanced emotional questions that seek to differentiate the experience from competitors.

Pointed questions can get to the heart of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. These types of questions provide specific, structured feedback that provides brands and locations with valuable analytical insight into customer feedback. This pool of structured feedback can be applied against various algorithms to produce a wide variety of specific performance scores. This scoring can act as a baseline to measure past success and forward-looking performance targets.

Follow the buzz…

Customers themselves have driven the growth of a new channel of feedback as well.

In contrast to the structured data provided by customer surveys, unstructured text comments can provide a qualitative view into customer sentiment. On the surface, these qualitative comments may appear more difficult to decipher than structured scored data but by applying appropriate analytical tools, these customer comments may uncover upcoming or unseen trends before the structured feedback. In addition, these customer comments can serve to validate scored data by providing additional qualitative insight.

Understanding these comments takes more than just reading through them one by one.  Natural language processing tools help to decipher what is happening across the full spectrum of feedback by categorizing and analyzing what topics are being discussed, which topics are most positive or negative and what co-occurring topics are being mentioned together.

Keeping pace with your customer’s needs should be a fundamental of business. It’s been said that any business that defines itself by product rather than by customer benefit has a limited lifespan. However, acting on that objective becomes harder and harder every day. A well executed and thought out customer experience management program could be the missing link in achieving that objective.

As I’ve discussed many times before, these days it seems like many brands are fearful of social media and the potential for it to be a channel for consumers to quickly share negative experiences, or one-off incidents of bad employee behavior. Nobody wants to be associated with the next viral video of employee bad behavior or a viral story of product quality issues. You could argue that some of this stems from the general cynicism that seems to have taken over much of the world since we entered this great recession. Lately though, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of more good news than bad in my social streams. Perhaps people tweeting and sharing more good news than bad is a sign that the economy may finally be pulling out of this never-ending recession.

A case in point is a fantastic story that recently went viral about a simple good deed done by a manager of a Red Robin restaurant.

You can read about it here.

For those of you who may not be familiar with this story, here is the short version.

• An obviously pregnant woman visited a Red Robin location for dinner
• The manager noticed her pregnancy and gave her a free meal along with a nice message attached to the receipt wishing her good luck.

A simple gesture, but a gesture that created a story worth telling, and more importantly a story worth sharing.

The reality is that, in the restaurant world, incidents like this happen every day. The nature of dining out is that every restaurant visit should be a special occasion. Whether for the sake of not having to cook on a hectic weeknight, or to celebrate a special occasion such as a birthday, brands need to be able to make every dining experience feel special.

One of the challenges that local restaurant managers have is that with the hustle and bustle of day to day operations it’s difficult to stay on top of staff to ensure they are doing all the little things that make a difference all the time. That’s where the action driving capabilities of today’s CEM solutions can come in to play. These action driving tools are designed to be coaching tools rather than the reporting tools of the past. By providing not only a snapshot of current team performance, but also proactively suggesting the small front line actions that can add up to better guest experiences, these tools go from simply being reactive reporting, to proactive performance improvers.

When they are successful in providing all the little touches that can make these occasions feel so special, such as was done by the Red Robin manager, then it’s become increasingly important for restaurants to provide these happy customers with an easy way to share their stories with their friends.

Again, this is where a well thought out CEM solution can come into play. By their very nature, these solutions will be able to help you identify and filter out your happiest customers. By taking that as a starting point, and providing those same happy customers with an easy way to share great experiences, CEM can become an ideal platform to generate the type of positive social sentiment that most brands deserve, but unfortunately don’t get.

You should get credit for your efforts! After all, you work hard every day with the hope that your guests will share their great experience.

Siri

Chances are, you have already heard about Apple’s infamous iPhone personality. Through extensive marketing campaigns, Apple unveiled Siri, a feature that allows users to interact with their phone by speaking to it. Yes, that’s right, by speaking to your phone.

Say you wanted to know what the weather was going to look like, all you would have to do is say to your phone, “Weather.” Your phone then proceeds to reply with the weather forecast in your area. Want to check how busy your day is? Just ask, “What’s my day look like?” Your phone will then report your day. Is Siri the beginning of pocket artificial intelligence? It (she?) very well may be.

Why am I talking about Siri? Because Siri demonstrates the real-life application of some very cool speech-to-text technology. Speech-to-text is the ability of a computer to transcribe spoken language into usable text. This type of technological ability is very new but maturing rapidly.

Watson

Yet another famous piece of artificial intelligence that you’ve likely heard of, Watson is an IBM supercomputer that gained wide acclaim by appearing on Jeopardy! and defeating two of the game show’s top champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Over three days of trivia, Watson racked up $77,147, whereas Ken and Brad took in $24,000 and $21,600 respectively. As the Jeopardy! clues were being displayed visually to the other two contestants, Watson was receiving them through a direct text feed. Once the text was input, Watson didn’t just recognize the words, he (it?) understood how they related to each other. With that understanding, he analyzed 200 million pages of information to find the correct answer—all in the time it takes to sneeze.

Is Watson the first step toward machines taking over the world? Quite the opposite, actually. The IBM technology that fuels Watson has the potential to be one of this generation’s greatest allies. It’s already being used to improve the medical diagnosis process by combining symptoms, family history, current medications, doctor’s notes, and other information to suggest a diagnosis.

Speech-to-Text

If you want the analytical powers of a supercomputer like Watson (and, trust me, you do), you need text. In a world that still communicates verbally first and written second, we need more than a computer with Watson’s brain; we need one with Siri’s ears.

That’s the role of Speech-to-Text. Combine an advanced speech-to-text engine with an analytical supercomputer and you have the key to immense possibilities. In an article written by Jon Gertner and published in Fast Company, the author builds on the words of IBM’s chief of research, John Kelly, to point out this very thing:

“IBM executives have come to believe that Watson represents the first machine of the third computer age, a category now referred to within the company as cognitive computing. As Kelly describes it, the first generation of computers were tabulating machines that added up figures. ‘The second generation,’ he says, ‘were the programmable systems—the mainframe, the first IBM 360, PCs, all the computers we have today.’ Now, Kelly believes, we’ve arrived at the cognitive moment—a moment of true artificial intelligence. These computers, such as Watson, can recognize important content within language, both written and spoken. They do not ask us to communicate with them in their coded language; they speak ours.”

Pearl-Plaza

We live and breathe the voice of the customer (VoC) trade every day. We collect millions of surveys every month from the individual customers of our clients. We have held the benefits of speech-to-text and IBM Watson technology in our hands. And they are stunning.

Using these universal-grade systems, our ability to analyze customer surveys and reviews for real-time, actionable insights has leapt forward to include all unstructured, unsolicited feedback across multiple written and spoken world languages.

Let me walk you through just one scenario: a phone survey. Last year, we collected 113,000 phone surveys for one of our clients. To put that in perspective, it would take that client 1,000 hours a year to listen to every survey—that’s one full-time employee listening to surveys non-stop for six months, and that doesn’t even take into account the time involved with organizing, analyzing, and reporting the results!

Is this how you plan on hearing your customers? Is it even worth it to listen to your customers anyway?

Yes. It is. The reality is, you can’t afford not to. When business analysts are telling you to care about every single one of your customers, they are not just speaking ethically, they are speaking financially. The quality and quantity of research on the matter has now made it undeniable.

Using Forrester’s customer experience index (CXi), for instance, statistics bear out the fact that U.S. businesses maintaining above-average CXi scores make millions, if not billions, more each year than businesses maintaining below-average CXi scores. The key to a high CXi? Listening and responding to customer feedback (Forrester, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012,” referenced here). Recent studies have also shown that customer retention efforts are more profitable than those to acquire new customers (Bain & Company, “The Economics of Loyalty”).

At Pearl-Plaza, we provide the tools to capture and use the voice of the customer in real time. This includes both speech-to-text and IBM analytics, two of the most powerful technologies the business world has ever seen.

Your customers expect to be heard individually and addressed personally. The Speech-to-Text and IBM content analytics we use at Pearl-Plaza make that possible.