David Rich

Through our blog and whitepapers we’ve discussed examples and methods on how to improve your customer experience but every program needs a starting point. Your starting point is typically with training and education.

Jay Goltz for the New York Times published a great piece on reforming your customer experience program. Goltz boils it down to what we know is the key to improving customer service: employee training.

Customer experience programs are not simply great ideas drawn on the whiteboard or brainstormed in the boardroom. Solid customer experience programs are formed through training and education. The retail industry is constantly evolving. Our customers are changing their shopping behaviors, the economy dips and rises, and new technology regularly unfolds, all of which require ever vigilant attention to our customer experience.

Every successful business connects with customers by using purchase history data. How well you maintain and use your customer insight can make an enormous difference on the quality of customer service provided.

How to connect with your customers
If you are going to be using customer database to help foster loyalty and promotions, it needs to be managed well. Maintaining current and relevant purchase history is one step. Integrating the information into promotions and customer service is the heart of the process.

The best way to understand how to effectively leverage customer information in your organization is to look at an example. FreshDirect has incredible success using customer information database to promote loyalty and engage customers with amazing service. Highlighted in a Business Week's Interactive Case Study, FreshDirect attributes much of...

Shopper Intercept Interviews solve all of the projectability problems of focus groups while still offering a customer-centered format that allows an interviewer to ask broad questions with direct follow-up questions that capture the most important and relevant concerns of your customer.

1. Providing Accurate Insights for Brands or Agencies

As you know, Scan Data produces an objective overview of your customers’ purchases, but it doesn’thelp you understand the “whys”: Why this particular product? Why this particular brand? Why this particular time to buy? Or even why did a consumer not purchase a particular item?
Because they are conducted face-to-face with your customers in real-time, Shopper Intercept Interviews allow you do a “deeper dive” that answers all of these questions and more. With Shopper Intercepts you are on the frontlines of your business and are given uncensored front-row access into the mindsof your customers that an on-line panel could never do...