SATISFACTION ● Reality check

Internal evaluation programs aid campaigns

Why would a marketing publication, namely Marketing News, devote a special section entirely to customer satisfaction? A better question might be, why spend thousands or millions of dollars in creating a product or concept and then spend thousands or millions of dollars in advertising to drive people to the product or service, if you don’t know what you are doing to the customer when they finally do come into your business?

People spend money when and where they feel good. Industry leaders have long recognized that you can no longer compete on price alone and that customer service is the ultimate differentiator. Companies that dominate their segments worldwide know how much their customers are worth, specifically the dollar amount raised by one customer that frequents the business an average number of times for five, 10, even 20 years. For example, my wife and I really love a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., called Mango’s. We easily average $60 a visit and eat there about twice a week. If we remain happy with them, we’ll mean $124,800 to their business over the next 20 years. Because customer satisfaction is the key to repeat business and long-term patronage, companies have used mystery shopping services or internally developed secret evaluation programs to monitor the customer experience.

Being in the mystery shopping business myself, I’ve noticed a new trend in recent years. Companies are now using these same tools to monitor the execution and effectiveness of their in-store marketing campaigns. In the past, companies would have us evaluate operations-related factors, such as store cleanliness, staff responsiveness, friendliness and professionalism; all, of course, are great to know and monitor for a good consumer experience.
But, a few years back, the first glimmer of evolution began in companies asking us to monitor marketing tactics, such as suggestive selling. Now almost all of our customers can slice and dice that particular piece of data by region, store or even store manager. Is your staff suggesting the new side item 8% of the time or 98% of the time? That number means a big difference to the bottom line.

Long story short, we are now monitoring all aspects of in-store marketing, from long-term programs to new product rollouts. Wingstop Restaurants, a long-term client, is currently testing a new product in a few markets. Their marketing director, Andy Howard, has already told me that when they launch the product, he’ll want us to monitor the stores to make sure the counter person suggests the products, to make sure the point-of-purchase (POP) materials are displayed and in the right spots, and to ensure that each customer receives a coupon for the product for their next visit. They communicate all their evaluation standards with everyone in their organization ahead of time, and there is a lot of friendly competitiveness between their franchisees, given they give out great awards at their convention each year for those with the highest mystery shopping evaluations. So I have no doubt that even their first month’s numbers will be high on every criteria we check.

You can create the most brilliant campaign, but if it is not executed properly or at all, it won’t get the desired results. Sometimes marketing departments get disappointing first-month results and realize more communication and training is in order to make the campaign work. For
instance, we represent a large consumer electronics company that wanted their resellers to mention a certain higher margin accessory item with certain predisposed buyers. At the end of the first month, nationwide this was happening only 12% of the time. The higher margin item was the perfect companion sale to a loss leader to which it was an accessory—a perfect opportunity to add nice profits where there were very little. After reviewing the firstmonth numbers, management took a second pass at training the sales clerks while discretely sharing each person’s individual scores with them. The second month, percentages jumped up and so did profits.

Measuring and monitoring performance and delivery of product and service is not a new concept; people have a tendency to do more of what you inspect rather than what you expect. We also know that recognizing or even rewarding positive behavior makes it happen more often. Taking the consumers’ perception seriously in what you are doing to them is valuable; after all, their opinion is the one that really counts.

In today’s competitive business environment, front-line understanding of the steps and details of delivery of a product or promotion is more critical than ever. Learning exactly what item was missed or even what was implemented that didn’t create the desired effect is essential to the end analysis of the success or failure of a particular product or promotion. If you have a hundred evaluations of the execution of your process, you can be pretty sure that the resulting trend analysis is accurate. A program like this provides the action-producing data to make decisions with confidence so you can respond quickly to get desired results. Better business intelligence is a priority for every department today, so it is not surprising to see a trend in marketing
departments adding their criteria to company shopping lists.

Mike Albert is the founder and CEO of Satisfaction Services Inc., a leading provider of quality and service evaluations, a mystery shopping concept, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.