Listen to this week’s topic review:
I must confess that I’m a bit of an innovation enthusiast. I guess it would be a requirement for anyone working in the software technology industry. Still, I contend it is also a requirement for anyone responsible for customer experience strategy and assessing customer experience touchpoints. The customer experience requires an understanding of three key areas of the customer: their needs, expectations, and emotions. All easier said than done. Businesses tend to focus on their revenue, profit and growth strategy. Neither is incorrect, but it does not leave much room for overlap.
One thing my years of experience have taught me, however, is that companies will not grow if they are not meeting customer needs, and it is difficult to grow if expectations are not met. One place a customer journey template is helpful is in understanding how customers’ needs and expectations can be met. Often, despite having all these tools, businesses blissfully ignore that third aspect of customer emotions. When these emotions are ignored, the implications can be disastrous for a company.
I have had the good fortune to work with several retail companies as a customer experience expert as well as time as an operations manager for a retail company in my prior career. Within operations, most of the role dealt with cost drivers and sales projections. While it involved financial linkage analyses, I rarely dealt with anything customer-focused unless it was their sales and basket data. Within a grocery retailer, that data represented decisions ranging from purchasing to staffing. It was easy to look at those decisions separately from the customers’ needs, expectations, and emotions.
However, on observation I noted before leaving that grocery retail company that had previously been known as A&P, was that they were not innovating, and there was very little focus on the customer experience and the customer journey. I recall conversations about real estate holdings and pushing the company’s private-label brands. Still, even in my new role outside the company, I could not convince them to invest in a customer experience software platform. That retailer was no longer in business before I even moved to my next role in customer experience. Interestingly, a few of the private label brands from A&P have survived, but not the company itself.
A company that had been around since 1859 and was one of the major innovators in supermarket retailing simply stopped innovating and stopped focusing on the Voice-of-the-Customer that had made them a household name.
A few years into my career in customer experience management, I had an opportunity to work with another retail company that I had admired. Locally, they were named Gart Sports, but became Sports Authority and had become the largest sporting goods retailer in the US. In the early 2010s, I recall a meeting at their headquarters in Denver talking about understanding the customer feedback loop, building a customer journey map, conducting and the best way to leverage a CX Enterprise Software to grow. We were asked our perception of why their growth as a company did not reflect their goals when every new store proved to be successful. I was young enough to think they really wanted my answer.
When I mentioned they were not focusing on the customer and instead sabotaging on location every time a new location opened nearby, we were quickly dismissed. Even though I had done a rudimentary social media analysis talking about their need to be innovative with their service offerings, provide hyper-local services (as had been done by Gart Sports pre-merger), and focus on customer and employee experience, it did not meet the “company strategy” which was to grow the brand recognition and footprint.
A mere five years later, the retail sports goods company that had been around for 95 years liquidated its assets. In another bit of irony, its name remained on a stadium as a sponsor for another two years after the brand had declared bankruptcy. So their name recognition continued on, but mostly as a running joke for both the company and the team.
It is informative to look back as such case studies in what is often referred to as the “retail apocalypse” and understand what may have gone wrong (you can find an extensive list since 2015 here), but often you can trace it back to companies focusing on things other than innovation and the customer experience. Easily one of the most recognizable case studies is Blockbuster. While one of the shortest-tenured companies on a long list of dead retail chains, it made an immediate splash with innovating the customers’ approach to weekend entertainment. Yet, when an opportunity to continue that innovation they declined (recall they had a chance to purchase Netflix for US$50 million and turned down the company that is now worth upwards of $200 billion).
Innovation does not alway have to be a big change such as converting from an analog to digital model, but it is important to capture feedback from customers ensuring that you are meeting their needs and expectations, but also understanding where the customers may need innovation.
Capturing an open-end and applying sentiment analysis will be helpful in understanding areas that can be improved through tools like Outer Loop. Still, innovative tools like QuestionPro NPS+ and its unique “customer voting” option can accelerate ideas toward improving the offer to customers. You never know when the next, best idea will be thought up by one of your loyal customers – keeping you away from a retail (or any other industry) apocalypse.
Is there something wrong with your customer experience?
When you complete an honest assessment, the outcome can be beneficial, particularly when it comes to your Customer Experience program.
- Take five minutes and complete an audit for your organization here.
You may discover a gap in measurement, an opportunity to improve a process, the place where an organizational shift needs to take place or an opportunity to win a greater share of your customers’ wallets.
We all want that bigger “return.” In this situation, the worst-case scenario is that you’ll get information that will help your organization since there is no cost or obligation to complete this audit.
