Tag Archive for: customer experience

“Why Choose Us?”: One Question Companies Need to Answer

“Choose us!” so many companies tell us, and there’s usually a reason why we listen; or why we don’t.  Last week, I was hunting for stationery. This isn’t far out of my normal routine: I like stationery, but I needed something specific. In Kuala Lumpur, there are plenty of places to look, but I had limited time and did’t want to get stuck in traffic for the rest of the afternoon.

My first thought when I think ‘stationery’ is ‘bookshop’. That might just be the way I’m wired — predisposed towards any excuse to visit a bookshop — or it might have something to do with major bookshop chains in KL stocking stationery.

Also read this article for more information: How To Improve Customer Experience

My second thought was, ‘which bookshop’? There are several to choose from in the KLCC area, but my mind flew to my favorite: Kinokuniya. Now I could wax lexical about this bookshop, but I’ll spare you the reading and simply say — the staff are always lovely and helpful, their collection is good, and they tend to have what I need when I need it. Plus they’re reliable, and the products are always good quality.

When we’re looking for a service or a product we inevitably draw conclusions from things we hear from others, read on the Internet, and experience. We end up asking the question:

  • Why this brand?
  • Why this company?
  • Why this product?
  • Why this service?

The real question is a matter of trust:

Do I trust this brand/company/product/service?

Companies and their products/services have to earn trust gradually — and they do it by answering the question we ask ourselves before we buy their products or services: why choose us?

So my question? Why Kinokuniya? The quality of their customer service and their products.

My trust in this brand didn’t happen overnight; it started more than a decade ago when I discovered the store by accident in the Queen Victoria Shopping Mall in Sydney, Australia while on holiday. That day, seeing their collection, and experiencing their great customer service, they began to earn my trust and win me over — now, I consider myself a lifetime customer.

That’s not to say that we can’t fall in love with a brand or product the first time we see it; we can become totally enamored of a service after using it the first time. Some of us may not even be able to answer the ‘why’, but something made us listen when the brand said ‘choose us!’

Why do I prefer PC over Mac, for example — for what I do, I really should be using Macs, but I don’t.

Why Star Trek instead of Star Wars? Or vice versa. I’m sure wars have started for uttering that question out loud.

Of course, what it comes down to is preference and experience. I prefer PCs because I’m used to them and because my experiences with them have been — largely — positive, whereas my experience with Macs is limited and — more or less — littered with frustration (probably because I’m biased towards PCs). I readily accept that both have their pros, but I stubbornly prefer PCs.

And I’m not going to answer the Star Trek vs Star Wars question.

Trust is based on experience: if a company/brand has delivered only positive experiences then the trust level grows. This goes for both products and services — and of course, above and beyond everything: the level of customer service experience.

Let’s admit it: we’re more likely to recommend a product if the sales consultant who sold it to us was smiling and helpful. Similarly, we’re likely to dump a company entirely — and badmouth them on social media! — if we called in and received bad customer service, regardless of the quality of the product or service!

Trust: it’s hard as hell to earn, and easy as pie to break.

It’s not our job to give a company our trust, they’ve got to earn it. They’ve got to answer the question: Why choose us? 

For example, if I were trying to convince you to hire AQ Services to help you improve on your customer service experience, I’d say something like:

“We have helped scores of brands improve their front lines across a variety of industries, from the automotive to the retail and hospitality sectors. With more than 15 years of experience in mystery shopping and audits, we have the best tools in the trade to help you improve your business. Why AQ? Because your passion is our passion.”

In fact, I’ve used exactly that for our latest flyers.

In answering the ‘why choose us’, I’ve been honest about what we’re about and the reason why we believe you should choose our service above all of our competitors. I’ve offered you with our big selling points: our 15 years of experience, the industries we’ve helped, our mystery shopping and mystery audit specialty, and — perhaps most importantly — the punchline.

This piece isn’t trying to get you to give me your trust off the bat, it’s about inviting you to let us earn it.

All luxury brands try to answer the ‘why choose us?’ question at some point. KLM answers it by explaining itself here. Companies like the Body Shop have enough of a reputation to get away with not pushing their point too far, and let their history do the talking for them. Other brands try to answer with their entire personality. A good example of this is the Jack Daniel’s website.

If you look closely at any company you’ll find that they’re addressing the ‘why choose us?’ question at every opportunity. It’s what their marketing teams are all about:

  • Why our brand?
  • Why our company?
  • Why our product?
  • Why our service?

Why choose us? Because we’re the best.

The trick is for us, as the customers, to make up our own minds about who we really believe.

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Marketing to the Millennial Generation: A New Customer Experience

This is the age of the Millennial.

Born between 1980 and mid-2000s, Millennials are an ever growing presence in society, especially in the workforce. With the first wave of this generation now in their early to mid-thirties, they are a section of the demographic that will not be ignored. According to Forbes, Millennials in the United States alone make up a fourth of the population and have around $200 billion in annual buying power. Hubspot calls them the ‘most lucrative market’; the short version is: if you’re not focussed on the Millennial Generation then you’re going to get left behind.

The world is moving a lot faster than it was twenty years ago; there’s no escaping the connectivity we enjoy (or hate) these days. With social media platforms keeping everyone connected to everything all the time, and every new gadget being integrated into ‘the Cloud’, Millennials maintain connections in a way that we’ve never seen before. It’s become a way of life.

A White House report actually sites a source saying that “Millennials are more connected to technology than previous generations and a quarter of Millennials believe that their relationship to technology is what makes their generation unique.”

How does this affect businesses? Well, for starters, outbound and interruptive marketing tactics are out: this generation wants to be connected to their brands in a way that allows them to decide for themselves just how trustworthy a product or company may be.

Think about this for a moment.

A survey conducted in 2014 suggests that Millennials actually distrust marketing and advertising campaigns and are more likely to trust the word of information from social media and their closest friends. This fact indicates that we, as businesses looking to tap into this market, need to reexamine how we market ourselves and our products.

We need to move fast. We need to get onboard with the Millennial way of life and join in. This means byte-size chunks of information that we can “swipe” in and out of our lives: no more long emails! It also means changing your customer service approach from a human-centric one to a hybridization with technology.

With the advent of technology, marketing – and sales! – need to adapt. Marketing and sales representatives now play a crucial role in customer service relations. More often than not, the one in charge of social media will be answering many customer service questions. The digital customer service element is becoming more and more prominent. Millennials are more likely to use technology to do product or brand research, ask questions, and spread the word (good or bad!) than they are to come into a store to do so in person.

Does this mean we should abandon our sales consultants on the floor? Absolutely not. What about retraining our social media management team to be better more customer service orientated? Well, that’s not a bad idea regardless. In fact, your entire team should know how to deal with your customers. This is a customer-centric world now, with the Millennials at the heart of it!

The important thing to understand here is that Millennials have different expectations in terms of customer service. The rule of thumb when it comes to marketing (and selling) to Millennials:

    1. They don’t like waiting days for a response.
    2. If your content isn’t authentic, they’ll walk.
    3. They will Google your product and brand before they make a decision.
    4. They want an interpersonal connection with your company/product/brand.
    5. Once you’ve earned their loyalty, they’re likely to stay with you.

(Forbes)

In conclusion, we’re going to need a multichannel approach to deliver a great customer service experience. Your front line is no longer just the sales consultants on the floor, or the receptionists at the desk, it’s also the people sitting behind your social media platforms generating content and allowing for Millennials to connect to your brand on a personal level.

Further reading:

Utilizing Social Media as Part of Millennial Decision Making Process, Leah Swartz, Millennial Marketing

All Grown Up and Here to Stay: The Next Generation and the Small Screen Valentina Perez, Harvard Political Review

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Mystery Shopping: how it really works.

Mystery shopping is, ironically, a bit of a mystery to many people.

It’s called a variety of things: secret shopping, research shopping, mystery consumer, and several others depending on where abouts in the world you find yourself.

The Short Version

But what is mystery shopping really?

Mystery shopping is a valuable market research a tool where people observe the quality of products and/or services while acting like a regular customer. This information is then collated and analysed to create actionable insights.

Is mystery shopping the right tool for your business?

Mystery shopping can be adapted to most industries that have offer a service or a product. Mystery shopper services are performed all the time for hotels, airlines, restaurants, and retail shops. The only time when it might not be a good approach is for professional services like those of a lawyer or accountant. If you’re a law firm or a doctor you might be able to adapt it to mystery calling to check on the performance of your reception, for example, but obviously that’s as far as you can go. Still, it’s not like it hasn’t been done.

 

The Long Version

And does how mystery shopping really work?

The ‘regular customer’ bit often leads to confusion. Understandably, because there’s a little bit more to it than that.

A mystery shopper is charged with discovering how specific elements of your business work.

Say, for example, that you run a bath and shower soap store. You want to know whether your customers are happy with your staff’s level of service. Of course, you could ask them yourself, but you might not get a realistic response: people are easily influenced by different thing, after all. Instead, let’s say you hire a market research company or a mystery shopping specialist to check into this for you.

You and your new specialist will sit down and discuss the possible options to get to the bottom of what you’re after. For something arguably as straightforward as checking on how your staff is treating customers, a fairly simple scenario can be developed.

The company will select appropriate people and set them up with a visit to your shop. When we say ‘appropriate’ we mean that you and the company can specify the sort of person you need. If, for instance, you only want to know what your middle-aged female customers think of your staff, then you’ll only need women aged between 40-55. Depending on the industry you’re in, or the specificity of the data you’re after, you can narrow it down even further. The goal is to get specific information that will address whatever question you have about your product or service.

So a little bit about terminology before we move on so we’re all on the same page:

Mystery Shop or Mystery Visit: the act during which the research is gathered. Now if we’re going to pick over the semantics, I suppose we could argue that a ‘mystery shop’ is on in which the shopper actually buys something, and a ‘mystery visit’ more closely resembles a simple look around.

Mystery shopper: the individual who conducts the shop/visit.

Shop/Visit Scenario: the steps shoppers must take during their shop/visit.

After having isolated your shopper profile you’ll have to decide on your scenario. Do you want to know how your staff react to a particular customer complaint? Or do you want to make sure your staff is following the correct procedures in closing a sale? The scenario is designed to isolate those specific issues.

Let’s say you want to see how your staff deal with a customer returning an item because they bought it by mistake. You might have a system in place to deal with this, but is your staff following that system? Alternatively, you might just want to see how your people deal with this without any previous training or system.

Either way, your scenario could run something like this:

  1. Shopper browses wares.
  2. Shopper purchases a packet of soaps.
  3. Shopper leaves
  4. Shopper comes back ‘realizing’ they’ve accidentally bought the wrong brand of soap and would like to return the items.

During this scenario, the shopper is assessing the reaction of your front line staff, remembering what they say, how they say it, whether they wore their uniform. All the things you’ve requested the company to analyze.

When the shop is finished, the shopper will fill in the questionnaire.

This questionnaire will be something that you and the company have finalized together after deciding on the scenario. It will run through all the things you’re looking to check.

These finished questionnaires are where the valuable data comes from: they’re checked for quality and consistency and then analyzed. The data that is gathered from this is then presented to you in a report, allowing you to see the answer to your question clearly and quickly.

Obviously this is a general overview of how mystery shopping is conducted; and I haven’t even touched on how mystery shoppers are recruited – that’s something for a completely different entry, and possibly a different department.

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