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FOOD
FORUM - Grocery Headquarters News Article on Shopping
The bottom line on service
A well-run quality evaluation program can be a key reason your
shoppers are happy with your stores and keep coming back.
Do you know how much your customers are worth? More importantly, do
your checkers and front line employees know? If a family spends $100
per week and shops your chain for the next 20 years, it is worth
$104,000 to your company. Losing just 10 of those customers can mean
losing $1 million.
The bottom line is that a customer's experience is made up of many
small things that add up to a happy, loyal customer or to lost
business. Because chains can no longer compete on price or location
alone, customer experience is the ultimate differentiator and can
mean millions to your bottom line.
It has long been known that it is much cheaper to keep existing
customers happy than to do the advertising necessary to find new
ones. Therefore, it makes sense to put a mystery shopping program
together that gathers information from the customer's perspective to
ensure a customer experience that is consistently superior to those
offered by your competitors. A good quality evaluation/mystery
shopping program can communicate to all employees the standards by
which your chain expects to operate and then measure and monitor to
be certain the standards are being met chain-wide.
Whether you create a program internally or outsource, there are
certain elements you should include in a high quality evaluation
program:
.Always communicate up-front to all employees the standards you'll
be measuring. I've encountered many who want to shop their employees
in order to catch them doing something wrong. Recognizing or even
rewarding positive behavior makes it happen more often. Many
businesses foster company pride and healthy competitiveness between
employees by sharing company averages with individual scores and
presenting year-end awards to those who consistently score high.
Making a big deal over the top performers goes a long way toward
communicating top-down philosophy for superior service.
.Build suggestive selling into your program. Yes, you can add
substantially to your bottom line just by retaining old customers
and winning new ones with a good evaluation program. But if the
associates at your butcher shop, bakery and cheese counters
consistently suggest that customers try new products or suggest
particular in-store promotional items, the incremental revenues can
be enormous. Do you know what moving your suggestive selling
percentages from 8% of the time to 98% of the time company-wide can
mean in revenues? Do a quick analysis with the average price at each
department for some shocking numbers.
.Timely data and frequency are key to analyzing the company's
performance. If you have 100 evaluations of the execution of your
process, you can be pretty sure the resulting trend analysis has
accuracy. Shopping your stores frequently will ensure accurate
information that will provide the actionable data to make decisions
with confidence.
Now, if you don't have tens of thousands of shoppers to choose from,
your employees may get to know your secret shoppers and perform
completely differently for them. I've heard funny stories of
employees using a certain code over the store intercom to alert
co-workers that the shopper was in the building. You must use
different shoppers all the time to ensure accurate results.
Also, timely information is important. Evaluations should be
immediately e-mailed to the head office, field management and
location management so that the experience is still top-of-mind and
the evaluation makes more sense to your employees, and so that
management can identify problem areas more quickly. It is important
not only to know your organization-wide averages but to be able to
slice and dice each particular evaluation parameter by region,
store, employee and store manager.
Make the program and its data available to all departments. Years
ago, operations departments were most interested in creating
evaluation programs to make sure all operating standards were being
met. They would evaluate things like the store's cleanliness and the
staff's responsiveness, friendliness and professionalism-all, of
course, great things to know and monitor for good consumer
experience. But over the past few years, we've seen companies get
more bang out of each evaluation by building in parameters that
benefit every department. Companies are now using the evaluations to
monitor the execution and effectiveness of their in-store marketing
campaigns. You can create the most brilliant campaign, but if it is
not executed right or at all, it won't get the desired results.
Evaluations are a great way to follow up and follow through with
your short- and long-term in-store marketing promotions. Also, be
sure that HR personnel are privy to all data, so they have employee
evaluation intelligence from the customers' perspective. After all,
customers' opinions are what really counts because they bring in the
dollars.
Measuring and monitoring performance and the delivery of service is
not a new concept. However, doing it right and consistently can mean
millions to your bottom line. People shop where they feel good, and
an effective quality
evaluation program will ensure they feel good with you.
Mike Albert is founder and CEO of Satisfaction Services, Inc., a
provider of quality and service evaluations based in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla. He can be reached at (800) 564-6574.
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Mike Albert is founder and CEO of Satisfaction Services, Inc., a provider of quality and service evaluations based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
He can be reached at (800) 564-6574 954-564-6570
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