Grocery Headquarters News Article Evaluate and Improving Customer Satisfaction Service
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FOOD FORUM - Grocery Headquarters News Article on Shopping

The Bottom Lline 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 Satisfaction Services Inc.

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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