Thought Leadership

Customer experience (CX) is often driven by one seemingly universal edict: The customer is always right. But forward-thinking companies are gathering data about what actually pleases customers—and it turns out employees’ own happiness is an integral factor.

Pearl-Plaza’s own CX Trends research found employees are the single largest factor in making or breaking the customer experience. The data shows a positive link between employee experience (EX) and a great customer experience, in addition to significant financial gains like increased sales and the ability to maximize business performance. In fact, companies in the top quartile for employee experience see triple the return on assets compared to those in the bottom quartile. 

Employees who feel engaged and valued will often remain loyal, productive members of their company. They’re also more likely to turn this positive energy toward tasks that benefit customers, whether they’re helping a shopper choose a new outfit or writing code for a customer-facing app.  

To better understand how to improve customer experience, companies need to harness the positive effects of employee experience. This starts with accurately measuring employees’ true feelings about their roles and the overall workplace. From there, a business can develop an actionable EX index and use it to focus their resources and drive impactful change. 

However, working for a company inspires emotions, purpose, and connections that can’t be measured by only asking simple questions. This means metrics like Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which doesn’t target these factors and instead is rooted in gauging an employee’s enthusiasm, are inherently inaccurate. The eNPS metric is also based on the misconception that people are as likely to recommend a workplace as they are to recommend a product or service; in reality, they’re notably less likely to do so.

Therefore, companies need to apply behavioral science to truly understand employee experience and employee engagement, and how it ultimately drives customer experience. We recommend measuring the following five elements, which were partly informed by a definition developed by Dr. Wilmar Schaufeli, professor of work and organizational psychology, and his colleagues.

#1: Vigor 

This is the energy an employee invests in their job, and the inspiration they draw on during tough times. Vigor measures an employee’s feelings surrounding their work rather than how they execute that work. 

#2: Absorption 

Absorption measures the way vigor appears in employees’ day-to-day work. In this sense, absorption is defined as the state of being so immersed in a task that employees have no desire to break away. 

#3: Dedication 

Dedication indicates employees’ long-term commitment and pride in their work. It shows how both emotion and action last over time. 

#4: Culture

An employee can’t sustain high levels of vigor, absorption, and dedication without a strong, positive work culture to support them. Culture isn’t just benefits and perks; it’s a sense of fitting into a larger, more meaningful whole. 

#5: Orientation Toward the Customer

A great employee experience does more than keep employees happy: It drives meaningful results for the customer. Companies should check in to make sure employees are directing their energy toward this key goal and others that are relevant and strategic to the brand.

When it comes to employee experience, employee engagement is only part of the story. That’s why, to gain actionable insights and improve customer experience, companies should measure external factors that drive employee behavior, as well as employee experience’s impact on customer experience at their specific company. Are employees directing their vigor at serving clients or impressing their managers? The answer matters to your long-term customer experience—and long-term success.

Learn more about the specific questions you should be asking your employees in this featured article!

Employee experience (EX) is quickly becoming a mainstay metric for businesses. Much like customer experience, EX is a critical factor for success with its ability to identify and drive impactful change within organizations. Why? Because employees are the most prevalent factor in making–or breaking–memorable, positive experiences for customers. 

5 Elements for Employee Experience Measurement

The average employee spends just over four years at a given job, and the experiences they have during their tenure are a crucial part of retaining them as part of your staff. Creating a positive environment for employees inspires passion and commitment toward their work–which results in better customer service and stronger performance, both of which contribute to the overall success of the organization. 

Our latest PoV, “The EX Factor: 5 Areas That Effectively Measure the Employee Experience,” takes an in-depth look at the five key elements companies should consider when measuring employee experience. The first three areas were developed by Dr. Wilmar Schaufeli, professor of work and organizational psychology; the last two areas are derived by our Pearl-Plaza Employee Experience Experts. Whether you regularly distribute surveys or collect feedback on a one-to-one basis, incorporating these elements into your employee experience strategy can help keep workers engaged and interested in their job: 

• Vigor (Emotion): Measuring employee vigor is about determining their feelings toward work, how energized they are by their tasks, and if they feel their work contributes to their overall career goals. Vigor directly ties to employees’ investment in their job, ensuring they remain enthusiastic and optimistic in their role. 
• Absorption (Action): Absorption measures how immersed employees are in their work. This allows you to uncover the parts of the job where they feel fully invested, tasks they enjoy, and general sentiment and enthusiasm. Absorption also ties back to vigor, allowing you to pinpoint where–and to what extent–emotions appear regarding work. 
• Dedication (Commitment): In addition to understanding how excited and invested employees are at your company, it’s also important to gauge their dedication. For employee experience, dedication is defined as the involvement in one’s work and the accompanying sense of significance, pride, and inspiration. Measuring employee dedication allows you to see how their emotions and actions develop over time. 
• Culture (Support System): Strong company culture isn’t strictly about benefits and perks. It’s about the support your organization provides for employees. Do you have strong corporate values that employees support? Is there a clearly defined corporate identity, mission statement, and brand promise that employees are aligned with? Employees can only sustain ongoing levels of vigor, absorption, and dedication if they feel strongly about a positive culture that they want to be part of. 
• Orientation to the Customer (Impact): There are plenty of instances where employees are happy with their managers, team, and overall company environment, but feel less-than-enthusiastic about customer interactions. It’s important to survey employees to understand how and where they channel feelings about work–both good and bad. It’s important to gauge employee engagement as it relates to internal team members, as well as how it relates to delivering excellent value and experiences for customers.

Employee experience is about the people behind the company, much in the same way that customer experience is about the people behind the purchase. Understanding what motivates, inspires, and drives action for employees is key to creating better, lasting experiences for them. 

Interested in more tips and insights on measuring employee engagement? Download our PoV, “The EX Factor: 5 Areas That Effectively Measure the Employee Experience” today.

What do you think of when you hear “radical innovation?” When you look past the buzzwords, you’ll find an idea that is at the heart of technology—the idea that humans can create something that breaks the mold and changes the way we complete tasks in everyday life. 

The theme of this year’s Forrester CXNYC conference was “Changing the Game—Leading Radical CX Innovation,” and since then, I have found myself thinking more and more about what radical innovation looks like in our space.

If you were to look at customer experience from a bird’s eye view, you would see a mass of legacy approaches. Why? Because most companies are still talking about CX in a vacuum. The truth is that experience data is everywhere; it’s in different languages and on different channels and forums, comes from a variety of audiences, and lives both inside and outside of traditional Voice of Customer programs. 

Customer feedback data is important, but it is also limited. It only offers one perspective on how to leverage CX to improve relationships and business outcomes. To be innovative, CX professionals need to tap into the full experience ecosystem, harnessing intelligence across channels,  from whenever, wherever, and however your customers are talking to and about your brand, and integrate that with other sources of customer data and analytics—clickstream data, CRM data, etc. To be radically innovative, however, requires CX professionals to think even bigger—expanding their perspective to also include employee and market intelligence.

This is our focus at Pearl-Plaza; to look beyond what CX has been to envision the future of feedback, and then create the technology that realizes that future. At Forrester CXNYC, we presented an example of how we are empowering our client Massage Envy to be radically innovative by looking at their brand experience from both a customer experience and employee perspective finding the critical intersections.

The Inseparable Relationship Between CX and EX

The connection between customer experience and employee experience has long been discussed, but what does that actually look like in the data? Our client Massage Envy was able to paint a picture of this connection and discover actionable intelligence when they implemented an EX program to complement their existing CX program.

Massage Envy had been using Pearl-Plaza to measure points on the customer journey for more than four years. There were strong indicators in their customer data regarding the connection between customer turnover and employee turnover and customer satisfaction. 

Using these indicators, the Massage Envy team partnered with Pearl-Plaza Employee Experience and Data Sciences team to implement an employee experience program that would mirror the path of the customer journey. 

In the course of the analysis, the team was able to identify key drivers of employee satisfaction and correlate them to customer satisfaction. Massage Envy was then able to act on this intelligence by implementing improved training procedures, which in turn lead to higher employee satisfaction, improved customer experience and better profitability for their business—a definite win-win-win result! 

Combining Strategic Services with Sophisticated Technology

Brands like Massage Envy are truly leading radical CX innovation by implementing technology that assesses the entire experience (customer, employee, and beyond) and delivers true intelligence. 

This success was made possible not only by innovative technology, but also by the philosophy behind our solution: “Machine-driven, human assisted.” This idea of combining strategic services with sophisticated technology is crucial given the sheer amount of complex data today’s companies take in, as well as the amount of meaning we need to derive from it to make it actionable. 

If we rely solely on human analysis, getting meaning from this mountain of data is impossible. There simply aren’t enough data scientists in the world or hours in the day to process the amount of data companies gather. On the other hand, computers on their own are fallible. 

The Pearl-Plaza solution uses data science—algorithms, machine learning, neural nets, and others—to create smarter, better analytics that are carefully curated by trained data scientists. The machine-driven approach allows businesses to address the complexities of data overload while the human assistance provides the context and direction that delivers truly actionable results.

The success Massage Envy had with this solution is proof that the industry is changing. Relying solely on technology and customer feedback isn’t going to cut it in today’s experience economy. I believe our VP of Data Science, Levi Roberts, said it best: 

“The future of feedback is coming, and it’s becoming more and more clear that technology cannot be the only solution to solve experiences that are emotionally charged. In a world where consumer expectations are rising faster than brands can keep up, it is the right combination of strategic services and tech that will drive experiences forward and unlock future success.”

With a 360 view of experience and the combination of strategic services and sophisticated technology, Pearl-Plaza is leading in radical CX innovation, realizing the future of feedback today.

The ability to connect employee and customer data and combine strategic services with sophisticated technology are just a few of the many analyses available in the Pearl-Plaza Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform. To learn about more about how we are radically innovating the world of CX, read the full platform eBook today!

I recently caught a terrific article in the Wall Street Journal skewering the over-reliance on Net Promoter Scores. As I read it, I couldn’t help but take it one step further.

NPS was created at a time when we didn’t have the technology to understand customer data in its native form. We now have that technology and can move beyond calculating metrics to deriving deep meaning from the natural conversations customers are having through open-ended comments, social media channels, contact centers, video, voice and even images.

In essence, NPS attempts to reduce the human experience to a number. And at a larger scale, structured surveys dumb down feedback regarding the real and complex human experience.

The future of feedback is in allowing customers and employees to communicate whenever, wherever, and however they want, preserving that data in its native form, and then applying advanced analytics to uncover the intelligence that will drive true change in the business.

This philosophy was a big reason Madison Dearborn Partners chose to become new investment partners with Pearl-Plaza. John Lewis, current executive partner at MDP and now executive chairman of Pearl-Plaza, shared this validating perspective with us:

It used to be that owning third-party market data gave companies a competitive edge. Today, most organizations are awash in data, and the real opportunity is integrating large and disparate types of data using advanced analytics techniques like artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems very differently.

This is especially relevant in the fast-growing area of customer experience, where understanding customers and what you can do to drive increased loyalty is everything. Most vendors try to do this with traditional surveys. In light of the multidimensional relationship brands now have with their customers, that simply isn’t enough.

I couldn’t agree more. The CX market has long been under served by both metric-heavy and market-research-led approaches.

In launching the XI Platform, we are making our vision of moving from basic insights to true intelligence, real — bringing valuable first-party data together with social and operational data, and then applying advanced analytics all in a single environment.

Yes, there will continue to be business leaders—and even experience management platforms—who rely on metrics like NPS and structured, do-it-yourself surveys that dumb down the data, but the industry is changing. And it will not be toward more surveys, but beyond surveys.

The world of customer experience (CX) is constantly changing. CX professionals are always on the lookout for the latest and the greatest way to approach their customers, gain insights from their customer data, and leverage those insights in a way that will help improve experiences as well as the bottom line.

So what do CX professionals need to change in order to be ready for the future of feedback?

It’s simple: companies need to broaden their view from a CX-only focus, and embrace the “experience ecosystem.”  

CX has never existed in a vacuum. There’s an entire experience ecosystem that impacts and contains signals about customers’ relationships with brands: employees, products, and services—as well as the competition.

Contextual information from digital behaviors, operational data, audit data, and marketing technologies and analytics also play a role.  Combine this with the fact that experiences today are spoken, shared, lived, recorded, clicked and even socialized, and understanding your customers’ experiences gets pretty complex.

Given the speed at which customer experience is evolving, you might be surprised to hear that most vendors are approaching this brave new world with traditional survey processing technologies.

Why does it matter? Our CTO David Joiner explains it like this:  “Applying an older relational data technology approach to today’s complex experience data problem is like trying to stream live media through an 8-track tape.”

Pearl-Plaza’s new Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform has a modern technology stack with data science at the core, allowing us to store, retrieve, and put the right analytics lenses to literally any type of data that will add meaningful intelligence to your understanding.

The XI Clouds:  The XI Platform also seamlessly unites three critical perspectives from the experience ecosystem in the Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience (EX), and Market Experience (MX) clouds.  Because they’re connected at the foundation, users can share between and beyond each cloud, promoting a more comprehensive view of the business, collaboration, and much smarter action. More on the new XI Clouds in our next blog.  

Want to learn more about the XI Platform? Check out the press release!

In my last blog, I discussed how brands are struggling to find ways to serve the needs of the business while also serving the evolving needs and expectations of their customers. Unfortunately, there’s still a serious gap between how well brands think they’re doing when it comes to customer experience (CX), and customers’ perceptions.

Our 2019 US CX Trends Report took a closer look at several specific gaps.  We surveyed 1000 consumers and 300 brands to these disconnects, as well as what brands can to do address them. The first trend we uncovered was how brands go about trying to understand how and why customers feel the way they do.

Customer data is one of the most precious sources of intelligence in understanding the health and wealth of your business. Companies are spending billions of dollars each year scrutinizing the vast number of digital interactions, from click through and online conversion rates, to social posts and online reviews.

And while these online measures of customer satisfaction and sentiment can deliver important information, the most essential information may lie somewhere else. In the study, we asked consumers about the most important thing brands can do to capture how they feel about them and the experiences they are providing. Options included monitoring their posts on online review sites, monitoring their social posts, capturing conversation with staff, as well as monitoring digital behaviors. Overwhelmingly, customers chose something else: asking them directly.

Nearly 70 percent of customers selected this option, with only 40 percent of brands reporting the same. And while the 30-point gap is notable, only 26 percent of brands said they are actually having direct conversations with customers about their experiences.

Brands also placed more emphasis than customers on the importance of online review sites and customers’ social posts. Because reputation management is definitely an important factor, it makes sense that brands place outsized emphasis on public forums, both encouraging positive chatter and quickly quashing the negative. And while companies must continue to monitor, respond, and take to heart what they are hearing online, prioritizing these forums at the expense of direct conversations may skew their view of the customer experience, which affects a slew of actions — from how to prioritize fixes and choosing which new ideas to elevate, to how company leaders and employees view and treat customers. When you feel and act as if you are always under public fire it will impact the foundations of your customer relationships.

To sum it all up, brands need to encourage customers to talk to them, not just about them. The answer for this disconnect is to open channels for direct feedback between you and your customers. Make it as easy as possible for them to tell you how they feel about your brand. Don’t shy away from asking them the important questions, and be sure to weigh both asking and listening wisely.

Thankfully, today’s technologies enable brands to do this at scale, and in a very personalized way. Harnessing customer listening platforms to capture, understand, and socialize the authentic voice of your customer is a powerful way to bring and keep the human element of the relationship front and center for both customers and employees.

Download the full “2019 CX Trends Report” to learn about the five trends you need to know as well as actionable takeaways to help you bridge the gap with your customers and create excellent customer experiences!

As a CX professional, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about your customers’ increasing expectations. Well, I’m right here with you. This statement may be common, but it’s incredibly over simplified.

Yes, customers expect more from brands, but they do so because there are brands out there delivering phenomenally simple, fast, different and even profound experiences. As Paul Papas, global leader of IBM Interactive Experience said: “The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.”

By these new measures, when a brand doesn’t keep up, gets sloppy, or doesn’t do the work to understand what its customers really value, those customers notice — and they put the culprit on notice.

For our 2019 CX Trends Report, Pearl-Plaza surveyed both consumers and brands to understand the alignments and disconnects in how well or poorly customer experience is delivered. While there are some bright spots, the overall takeaway is that most brands are still struggling to find ways to do right by their own needs while also serving the evolving needs and expectations of their customers.

One big red flag was the mismatch in how companies and consumers responded to whether brands are getting better at delivering an excellent customer experience versus just completing a transaction.

Fifty percent of brands responded that they are “definitely” doing better, but only 11 percent of consumers said the same.

Worse, nearly 10 times as many consumers than brands believe that experiences are definitely not getting better.

It doesn’t help that brands aren’t taking the right accountability for falling short. When asked how much responsibility customers have in helping create better experiences, 40 percent of brands reported that that customers were “very” responsible, with an unbelievable 12 percent stating that customers are “completely” responsible. Customers, on the other hand, see responsibility as a shared endeavor.

While these statistics make the state of CX may sound bleak, our research also uncovered wise counsel on how brands can reverse unproductive practices and make serious strides in the other direction.

Download the full “2019 CX Trends Report” to learn about the five trends you need to know as well as actionable takeaways to help you bridge the gap with your customers and create excellent customer experiences!

Data is the new currency. But without trust, brands can’t cash in on it, and it may actually cost them. Since consumers have more power over their data than ever, it’s up to brands to explicitly state the value they’ll deliver in exchange for it — and then consistently keep their promises.

Consumers expect brands to use personal data to create more individualized and relevant experiences, but thanks to a plethora of example of terrible execution, they are growing wary of sharing it. In fact, according to Pearl-Plaza’s 2018 CX Trends report, a whopping 75 percent of customers report most forms of personalization efforts that rely on access to their data as being somewhat creepy, creepy or very creepy.

Faced with growing customer caution and a host of policies and laws making their way through various countries and states around the globe, brands need to go beyond gimmicks and tricks to convince customers to hand over their data or risk losing their trust all together. Fortunately, consumers are less reluctant to share personal information if brands handle it responsibly — and if they get something they truly value in return.

According to findings from Pearl-Plaza’s report, there are a few best practices that can motivate today’s consumers to share data in the post-GDPR era:

Keep Customer Data To Yourself

An easy way to violate your customers’ trust is by selling their data. Customers are savvy about who has access to their personal data, and they’re not happy when they feel like the private information they’ve shared with brands is up for grabs.

Facebook learned this lesson the hard way. For many users, the Cambridge Analytica revelation proved to be a tipping point that led them to delete their profiles. Learn from Facebook’s mishap by refraining from selling or sharing data to companies without explicit customer consent.

For example, MoviePass has based an entire business model off of selling its customer data. But the brand makes it abundantly clear as to what data it’s collecting and selling from customers, who get cheap movie tickets in return. That brings me to my next point.

Offer The Right Value

Customers are more willing to share information if brands actually use it to improve their experience by offering something of value in return. That could mean insider exclusives, a more customizable and unique customer experience, or even just a more streamlined buying process.

The report reveals that 80 percent of customers will share personal information if they receive special or exclusive offers for doing so — which is why many brands are finding success requesting email addresses in exchange for special offers.

Asking for customer data is inevitable in today’s data-driven age, but brands that sweeten the deal in the right way create an exchange of value that not only nets a goldmine of data, but stronger relationships as well.

Don’t Be A Creeper

The report revealed that, for many customers, the line between “cared for” and “creepy” is thin. When using personal data to “make customers’ experiences better,” make sure to actually use it that way and instead of in ways that make them feel uncomfortable or worse.

Customers report that common strategies (like retargeting ads or aggressive emails about previously viewed products) are intrusive. In the study’s qualitative data, researchers found words like “annoying,” “stalked,” and “harassed.” This is worse when they perceive a crossover between physical and digital realms, such as feeling as though brands have been “listening” to conversations they’ve had offline, or knowing and using their physical location.

Additionally, customers are hesitant to give brands data they don’t feel would actually enhance their experience. Today’s customers are savvy, and they know what data brands need and what they don’t — for example, unless they are attending nearby events or receiving location-specific offers, they don’t want to provide location data for the sake of it. This puts pressure on brands to make a common sense case as to why they are asking for information.

Creepiness comes with consequences: Pearl-Plaza’s report reveals that 22 percent of customers report they will look for other brands after a creepy experience. Additionally, 20 percent will tell their friends and family, and one in 10 will share Big Brother-type experiences on social media

The stakes are higher than ever for brands to balance their own needs with their customers’ interests — especially when it comes to personal data. Brands must not only be responsible with data, but also use it efficiently to improve the customer experience without violating trust.

Could there be value lying dormant in your company? Claire Fastier gives three examples of AI unlocking efficiency and opening avenues for your customer like never before.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. From Google’s Arts and Culture app – which uses facial recognition technology to match selfies to thousands of artworks—to Pizza Hut’s plans for driverless pizza delivery.

In Australia, AI is hot on the agenda. The Federal Government’s 2018-19 budget revealed a $29.9 million investment over the next four years to strengthen Australia’s capability in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – and a recent report from AlphaBeta reveals that Australia could reap a $2.2 trillion opportunity by 2030 with greater investment in AI.

The application of AI to improve customer experience is particularly on the rise. In fact, this year the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), held in Las Vegas and possibly the most notable conference in the world for showcasing the latest in consumer technology, featured its first ever Artificial Intelligence Marketplace to showcase the latest innovations designed to perform human tasks.

Products ranged from big data analytics to speech recognition to advanced decision making to predictive technology. Many of these solutions are already being leveraged by great companies to add a magic touch to their services.

The question you should be asking yourself is: are you taking advantage of this? If not, here are three ways you can apply AI, and examples of companies which have done so effectively, to improve customer experience right now.

1. Automate simple customer interactions

There’s nothing less efficient than bogging down highly-skilled, highly-paid employees with basic tasks. Emerging technology in artificial intelligence can automate simple interactions, allowing your people to focus on more complex and nuanced customer interactions.

Gartner predicts that 95% of customer interactions will be driven by AI by 2025, leveraging chatbots and mobile messaging to complete simple tasks. A strong local example of this is superannuation firm AustralianSuper, which launched its chatbot, ‘Ash’, earlier this year and has seen more than 50,000 messages sent, achieving a 92% overall customer satisfaction rate.

Over in the US, supermarket chain Kroger announced its new Kroger Edge technology, which, among other things, will enable the company to instantly change prices and activate promotions on digital displays, freeing up employees who would otherwise change prices by hand.

This sort of automation can deliver a more consistent experience and a huge financial impact according to Juniper Research, which estimates cost savings of more than US$8 (AU$11.27) billion annually by 2022, up from US$20 (AU$28.19) million in 2017.

2. Augment your service employees

Another powerful application of AI is within your own organisation. By leveraging solutions that enable you to proactively anticipate customers’ needs and engage on an emotional level, customer experiences will shift from mundane to exceptional.

Some of the world’s largest retail, hospitality and financial services brands, for example, use Pearl-Plaza’s AI-powered technology to analyse unstructured (text-heavy) data and surface critical information when action is needed. Being able to pinpoint and act accordingly when customers are unhappy or in need of assistance is critical if you are to maintain and develop strong customer relationships.

3. Enrich your existing data

Finally, you can take all the data you have and put it to new use. As Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, notes, “there are a lot of places where AI simply lets companies use their data better, and AI usage is largely invisible to the customer. Retail sites, for instance, can observe the products people are viewing, and use that data to begin suggesting other, more relevant products to them than was previously possible.”

Recently, in addition to making targeted content suggestions, Netflix began tailoring the ‘cover art’ associated with a recommended movie or TV show, based on the user’s viewing history.

For example: the image displayed for a romantic comedy (I’m partial to The Truth About Cats and Dogs), will either play to the ‘romance’ or the ‘comedy’ of the film.

Or, it may feature the image of an actor who starred in other movies you’ve watched. For what it’s worth, Stranger Things has nine different cover art options.

There’s more need – and competition – than ever to deliver meaningful and powerful customer experiences. Fortunately, technology like AI is helping bridge the gap, creating more value for both companies and customers, and allowing brands the opportunity to truly differentiate on customer experience.

It used to be that retailers considered the four “P’s” of marketing when pushing their wares to consumers: product, price, promotion and place. Today, however, not many brands can rely on a single “P” to differentiate, but are instead dependent on one big “E:” experience.   

While the rise of Amazon originally created a serious question about whether fast, easy, and varied e-buying would largely replace traditional brick-and-mortar retail, the last year has turned the conversation to something more complex. Amazon, Warby Parker, and other born-digital brands have increased their investment in physical stores, bowing to the undeniable fact that some experiences — or components of the experience — simply can’t happen in the digital sphere.

Our 2018 Retail CX Trends study asked consumers whether a “recent, enjoyable” shopping experience occured at a physical store, digitally, or through a combination of physical and digital.  More than half of consumers (53 percent) said it was in a store.

The research also showed an interesting trend: The younger the consumer, the more likely they are to have enjoyable retail experiences in the digital realm alone, and as a hybrid blend of digital-physical. Brick-and-mortar stores will continue to be essential touchpoints, but retailers must elevate and embed digital elements to become and stay relevant to their next-gen customers.

Our researchers wanted to know what elements of a retail interaction elevate a mere purchase to an experience. In looking at both the quantitative and qualitative data, we saw a interesting story emerge.  Coming in at No. 2 was Personalization. Part of what elevates a brand experience is making customers feel special. And while retailers are directing the large majority of resources toward digital personalization, 30 percent of respondents said personalized treatment in stores is what elevates a mere purchase to an “experience.”

Now for the top-ranked response: Product quality. At first read, this may feel anticlimactic. After all, quality doesn’t have the same sparkle as some of the other options, like multisensory elements like smell, taste, touch, or access to experts. What this rather mundane-sounding selection indicates consumers’ focus on the experience beyond the initial purchase — the enduring impression that a good, quality take-away creates long after the transaction.  Each time your customers engage with the item or service reinforces a positive or negative impression toward the brand.

The Forgotten Experience

Retailers often forget that giving feedback about an experience is actually part of the experience. They over-survey their customers with questions that they want answers to, and do so in old-school, multiple choice formats.  

Our researchers wanted to know what kind of feedback experience consumers consider the “ultimate” experience. The top pick, by far, was the ability to give ratings at 88 percent. Thanks to the ease, quickness, and increasing gamification of ratings, this was not a surprise.

The next three picks included participating in focus groups (35 percent), speaking naturally via voice assistants like Siri or Alexa (26 percent), and sharing images (25 percent).

While making feedback fun and simple is nice for customers and can produce a mountain of valuable structured data to analyze, their stated willingness to use new technologies to share more detailed, more personal data is worth noting.  In line with other topics in the study, younger consumers are more willing to engage with brands in “intelligent” conversations; a gift that brands should embrace.

To learn more about what your consumers need and want from their retail experiences, get your free copy of “The 2018 Retail CX Trends Report” today!

Last week, I covered findings from Pearl-Plaza’s 2018 US Retail CX Trends Report that discussed how brands can earn their customers’ trust. This time I’ll delve into the second theme: Loyalty.

I’ve heard a lot of CX and marketing pros declare the old-school type of loyalty — “faithfulness to which one is bound by pledge or duty” according to Merriam-Webster — is dead. We wanted test this assumption while also exploring whether there might just be more complexity to customers’ commitments.

We started by asking about the object of consumers’ loyalty: do they feel more connected to brands, or to they tend to gravitate to specific products or services?

More than half of consumers gave a mixed response, saying that it depends on the brand or product/service. Slightly more (26 percent versus 21 percent) of customers said they tend to feel more loyalty to brands versus products.  Millennials were the most definitive group, with 30 percent saying they feel loyal to brands.  

For retailers, this is a critical distinction. Consumers are loyal to what and where they find value. Brand-level loyalty may be more about lifestyle or aspiration, while fealty to specific products may be more about efficacy. Of course there are products that have achieved near-brand status like iPhones that probably combine both motivators.

Knowing why customers commit can inform an incredible range of business activities, from brand messages and new product development, to demand generation campaigns and experience design.  

The next topic we looked at round loyalty is how and why it develops, anas well as  unravels.

The data revealed that for both scenarios, it’s a journey. The large majority of shoppers — 80 percent — said they “grew to love” a brand over time; the cumulative effect of great products, service, buying experiences, positive reviews and recommendations from others. Fifteen percent experienced “love at first sight,” and 7 percent committed after a glowing recommendation from a trusted source.

When it comes to breaking up with a brand, nearly two thirds (58 percent) of US consumers said it takes several “really bad” experiences in order to make the hard choice to leave; with 34 percent saying it’s more a matter of “growing apart” as they experienced a gradual decrease in what was special. Just 19 percent of customers said they only give a brand one chance to fail before they leave.

So what does this mean? Brands shouldn’t get too comfortable, though. While the research demonstrates that today’s retail customers can be quite loyal, there’s a limit to their commitment. Nearly 50 percent of customers say they’ve left a brand to which they were loyal to go to a competitor that is better at meeting their needs. Failing to stay relevant will accelerate the exit of even your most loyal customers.

For those fortunate brands that achieve loyalty status with their customers, the benefits are tangible and significant.   

• Long-term Relationships: A whopping 77 percent of consumers say they’ve held relationships with specific brands for 10 or more years. This is even true of 60 percent of Millennials, despite being relatively young.
• More, More, More: 61 percent of loyal customers go out of their way to buy from them, and 60 percent will make more frequent purchases (that number rises to 70 percent among Millennials); 50 percent will purchase more products.
• Tell a Friend: 75 percent of loyal customers will recommend a brand to friends and family.    

Because we’re in the business of customer feedback,  we also wanted to know how loyalty affects customers’ willingness to share data generally, and their feedback about their experience specifically. Here’s what the data revealed:  Customers who feel high levels of trust and loyalty are significantly more likely to share ratings (in the 90 percent range for both) and detailed commentary (both exceeded 70 percent) about their experiences.  A good number (30%) are also willing to hand over personal data (name, age, location, etc.), and 41% are up for sharing their purchase data (how much, what, where) with trusted brands.

While these numbers aren’t astronomical, they’re an important place to start. Establish trust first, and then deliver consistent value over time. It’s a long and complex road, but one brands must travel if they expect savvy customers to had over something they realize is precious.

To learn more about the latest retail CX trends,—including more statistics from our study on consumer loyalty—download the full report: “2018 Retail CX Trends: Trust and Loyalty in the Experience Economy”