Increase Customer Satisfaction: Your Employees' Role

The outcome of a customer's experience is directly related to employee behavior. Employees are important assets of all companies because they are the first and most of the time only connection between a company and its' clientele. The 4 factors listed below are important to consider during customer transactions:

The Employee’s Willingness to Become Involved:
Take the time to explain to employees, the reason your company is important to the clientele. The more informed employees are about the business the more excited they will be about helping customers. Motivate them to make a good first impression with the customers and it is acceptable to use salary based incentives.
The Employee’s Ability to Be Empathetic
The employee must always recognize the needs of a customer and find the best way to meet them. Sometimes it will not be possible to satisfy the customer within the first transaction, but the employee should be prepared to accommodate the client with other options. The customer will always remember an employee going out of their way to help because it will make them feel special that someone took time to listen.
The Employee’s Training
Training is essential to a business and should be a regular procedure for new and experienced employees. A well informed employee that knows solutions to everyday problems and the details of business procedures will make the customers feel more comfortable during their transactions. Scheduled training sessions and consistent communication with your employees will help them better serve clients on a daily basis
The Employee’s Authority to Deliver a Favorable Result
The employees must be aware of the power they possess with each customer they work with.  The customer is looking to the employee for assistance and opinions, which is the reason the employees need to be positive and informed. When there is conflict the employee must stay positive and find a fair solution. The turnout of the interaction can determine whether or not the customer will do business there again. 

Increase Customer Satisfaction

Instant-Replays has one goal: To help other businesses increase their level of customer satisfaction. During the next few weeks Instant-Replays will be posting blogs about what you can do now to improve your interactions between sales associates and customers.

There are several easy, but significant ways to increase customer satisfaction as soon as the customer walks in to your business:

• Shake hands
• Greet your customers upon arrival to the business 
• Remember to smile
• Ask if you can be of any service to them
• Be accommodating 
• Ask if they would like a refreshment
• Make eye contact
• Pay attention to voice inflection\
• Notice small details about your customers and compliment them
• Always encourage them to come back 

Complement Mystery Shops with Customer Surveys

     Instant-Replays understands the value of customer satisfaction and we continuously strive to improve our customer service and help other businesses improve. Instant Impressions is our customer survey division, which is a service that allows businesses to create customized surveys for up to 500 participants. 

     Try Complementing your company's mystery shopping package with customer surveys to obtain feedback from numerous customer responses rather than a single interaction. Surveys are a marketing tool that will dramatically increase sales because you will be able to improve daily business interactions based on the perspectives of current clients. Instant-replays will work with your business to create the customized survey and ensure that we maintain our survey response rate of 35%-50%. 

Why Should You Implement Surveys?

• According to studies by the Technical Assistance Research Programs Institute, 91% of unhappy customers will never buy from a company that has displeased them again – and will also voice their dissatisfaction to at least seven people.
   
• Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience. – White House Office of Consumer Affairs

• 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated – McKinsey
   
• 55% of customers would pay extra to guarantee a better service – Defaqto research

Our Best Training Tool...Video Mystery Shops

Our video mystery shops are one of our most effective training tools for your business team to utilize. Video shops will give you the opportunity to view the interactions between sales associates and clients through the client's perspective. Our shoppers will be wearing well-concealed state of the art equipment while offering your staff members every opportunity to provide professional service. Video shops allow you to obtain important feedback and advise your business team as necessary. The goal is for Instant-Replays to help you increase sales and customer satisfaction by providing feedback that matters. 

Visit the services page of the Instant-Replays website for video shop demonstrations:http://www.instant-replays.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=54

Mystery Shopping Beneficial to Property Management

     It is difficult to make improvements to the customer service provided by your property managers and leasing agents without knowing where improvements are needed. Whether intentional or not, people behave differently when the boss is watching so getting an accurate picture can be a problem. Mystery shops provide a way for you to get the needed information.

     The trick to using mystery shops successfully is to use them to develop and offer training to make improvements. Mystery shops have a bad reputation as a tool used to catch employees doing something wrong, or worse, as a tool to fire them. That’s not the best use of the service. When you compare the cost of employee turnover to the cost of additional training you can quickly see the value in this approach.

     There are many companies that provide this service. The best choice is one that has experience in serving the property management industry. Instant-Replays is a nationally recognized mystery shopping company that has worked with a wide array of industries including home builders and property management.
You will have options in the type of shop or shops that you want performed. The most commonly performed types are:

• Onsite shop – This involves an on-site visit to your location that is usually preceded by a telephone shop. An in-depth evaluation is written by the shopper.
• Recorded telephone shop – The shopper calls, participates in and records the call to your office.
• Internet shop – The shopper completes the online form on your site and tracks the response by your leasing professional.
• Video shop – The shopper carries a hidden camera and records the leasing professional’s performance. It offers the best view of the job done as well allowing you to see the property through their eyes. It also gives you the opportunity to show the employee their performance.

When used correctly, mystery shops can be a tool for recognizing excellence, improving performance and helping your property managers and leasing agents provide outstanding customer service.  When introducing mystery shopping to your employees your mindset is important. If you view it as a positive training tool it will go a long way towards influencing their view. Help them to see it as a way to increase closings, retain tenants and create a better team and everyone will benefit.

4 Tips To Increase Sales

     Ecommerce merchants frequently reach out to new and existing customers. Whether they use methods such as email, paid search, search engine optimization or banner ads, the goal is always the same: to drive qualified traffic back to their sites. Unlike brick and mortar stores, however, there is not always an opportunity to hear valuable feedback from these visitors and customers. Implementing a simple survey — powered by email — is an effective way to not only gain valuable feedback but to also garnish relationships and entice repeat purchases. Below are four tips on how and when to combine surveys and email.

1. The Purchase Follow-up

Merchants should have a transactional email program in place to communicate information about a purchase. Including a follow-up survey as part of that program is essential. Ask questions to help you improve your product, service or overall purchasing experience. Offer a discount towards the customer's next purchase as a reward for taking the survey. You’ll likely hear of any customer service glitches — from customers with problem orders. It will also help ensure a long-lasting relationship, which should spur future orders and referrals.

2. The Lapsed Customer Inquiry

Virtually all merchants have customers who have lapsed and have not purchased products in a long time. Determine who makes up this group — are they customers that may return in the future or a one-time purchaser who is not likely to return? Sending a survey to gauge the behavior of this group will not only help you market better, but will allow you to trim your file. If you have a more advanced email program, surveying customers to find out their email preferences is also a great way to segment your file.

3. The Lead Generation Survey

Depending on the product or service you sell, sometimes it takes a phone conversation to convert consumers who are undecided. Design a survey to isolate those who need more help with their purchase. This will reduce phone calls and allow you to pinpoint the responsive and ready-to-purchase customers. This survey can be a simple one or two question poll that could be automatically triggered during shopping cart abandonment — or perhaps a browsing abandonment.

4. The 'Next Big Thing' Survey

Determining the product needs of a customer base is among the valuable information a retailer can obtain. In the pre-iPod days, for example, I conducted a study on high school students, asking them to describe a product that they would be willing to purchase in the near future. The response was overwhelming: a music device similar to a CD player, with the ability to hold more music. Shortly after the survey, MP3 players hit the market. I witnessed the power that consumer demands have on the future of products and technology. By emailing out a survey every few months to your customers, you’ll get a better idea of their future demands and how you can be ready to meet them. You may not invent the next iPod, but you’ll better serve your customers.

Company Leaders Going Undercover

Mystery shopping is heading in a new direction as company leaders don disguises and assume false names to get the inside story on their brand from staff on the shopfloor.

Getting a chief executive to operate a till or make tea for staff might seem like a bit of fun, but having senior management experience their own brands on the frontline is a serious business strategy.

This mystery shopping approach has been made famous by Channel 4 TV series Undercover Boss. Senior executives spend two weeks working with frontline staff, doing everything from making burgers to stacking shelves, often finding out startling facts about their own companies.

Going undercover on the Channel 4 show made Vanessa Gold, the deputy managing director of Ann Summers, realise how much her staff knew about what the shop sells. After spending time on the shopfloor serving customers, Gold recognised just how valuable her staff members were.

She explains: “You can pay a lot of money for customer insight and we had it relatively free, on our doorstep.”

Apart from potentially saving costs on research, the time spent in store enabled Gold to understand how shop staff can feed into what the brand does at the top level. She says: “There is a very close relationship between our store teams and our customers. But we were failing to tap into what our teams know and using that information in some of our decision-making.” (See Q&A, below)

Using staff knowledge is also something that Brian Scudamore, chief executive of Vancouver-based waste disposal firm 1-800-Got-Junk, says he will do more of, having appeared on the Canadian version of Undercover Boss last month.

He explains: “One opportunity we saw was the potential to grow this business outside of urban centres. I realised that the small towns have junk too.

“One of the franchisees I visited was in a very rural market and he was driving up to 700km a day to pick up rubbish from houses, but he still found a way to make that model work.”

Scudamore also identified the company’s star performers during the show. Big rewards have been handed out to help keep hard-working staff motivated, with one truck team member being rewarded with a flight to Las Vegas for the company’s annual conference and entry into a poker tournament.

If you are not out there on the shopfloor, you can’t understand the customers

“He loves to play poker and had never been on a plane,” says Scudamore. “It is about taking the learnings from the show and recognising people who go above and beyond.”

Nikki King, who also appeared on Undercover Boss, has introduced management training for staff at Isuzu Truck UK as a result (see Case Study, below).

Identifying people for promotion is something that Martyn Birks, marketing director at discounter Poundworld, says he will do following his appearance on the Channel 4 show.

After gaining an understanding of what it is like for shop staff to work for the company, Birks introduced a programme to refurbish staff break rooms and canteens. He adds that he now spends more time meeting shoppers. “If you are not out there on the shopfloor, you can’t understand the customers,” he says.
The company has also changed its policy of docking wages when tills at its 170 shops do not balance up and when staff members are late.

But going back to the floor does not always have to be done in secret or undercover to reap benefits. Travel company TUI’s senior staff visit shops throughout the year, and the business now runs an annual scheme where 200 managers work in a Thomson or First Choice shop on the third Saturday in January, which is traditionally the busiest day of the year.

The benefits of doing this include getting direct feedback from customers and staff, and discovering why customers might go into a store rather than booking online, explains Nick Longman, distribution director at TUI.

This year’s back-to-the-floor day was Longman’s fifth, and he was struck by how hard the staff work to sell holidays in the economic downturn and the fact that they need as much information about the destination as possible.

“What really hit home to me was if we are going to sell holidays, we need to know a lot about those holidays; we really need our people to be experts in the products that we sell.”

As a result of this insight, TUI will increase the number of overseas familiarisation trips it sends staff on this year.

This year’s back-to-the-floor day has also shown how much customers want to interact with a person rather than a website. Longman makes sure he talks to the retail director once he’s back at head office to make sure the time spent in the travel agent isn’t wasted.

He says: “It’s all well and good everyone going back to have a nice chat with staff but unless it leads to action, you have lost part of the benefit of doing it.”
After all, it is customers who have the money to make brands grow and, as 1-800-Got-Junk’s Scudamore points out, it can be easy to forget the value of mystery shopping. “Sometimes you get caught in building a business and forget just why you are doing this. There are about 100 people in my head office, all working and busy, and it is easy to forget why we are here.

“I recommend other chief executives do it as a form of connecting with the reason they are in business.”

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/trends/going-undercover-key-to-insight-from-frontline/4000515.article