Our work in Retail
Within the fast-moving and competitive retail sector, our expertise lies in helping retailers design and manage their customer experience across multi-channels.
Our techniques are built from the ground up, capturing detail from in-depth analysis of customer attitude, feelings and behaviours that extends well beyond the reach of traditional satisfaction surveys or mystery shopping audits.
Our customer experience designs work across the business:
At the strategic level, we develop an ‘Experience Signature’ – easily recognizable and valued by customers, it enables retailers to bring alive their brand values and see them applied in the customer experience every day, throughout the business
At the operational level, we provide detailed experience mapping, using our Lifelines™ diagnostic tool to show:
- the areas of strength and weakness across the customer journey, including where customer expectations are unmet and competitors are preferred
- where new initiatives can resolve underperformance, based on ideas either co-created with customers, or validated by them
- how metrics can track value and ROI, whether driving revenue growth and loyalty, or cost-savings and efficiency
How Our Work is Used
From our universal goal of creating customer growth and loyalty from better customer experiences, our work has had a wide range of applications and benefits for retailers, including:
- brand strategy – using customer experience insight to reposition retail brands, both regionally and globally
- marketing plans – developing customer acquisition initiatives, based on insight into experiences and needs of specific customer segments
- store design and visual merchandising – using detailed customer shadowing to improve customer footfall and product interaction
- staff alignment and motivation – creating training workshops to instill a culture of customer service, based around consistent brand values
The Value Of Our Work
In today’s retail environment, delivering a consistent multi-channel customer experience is a challenging task. Customers are ever more demanding in their expectations from retailers offering multi-channel, and unforgiving when problems occur.
Our work provides retailers with both the knowledge and application for how multi-channels can be balanced to what customers value most. Rather than replicating retail experiences across trading channels, we advise harmonizing them instead.
Our ‘Experience Signature’ enables retailers to deliver the essence of their brand consistently, whilst still allowing the particular attributes of channels such as web, call centre, catalogue and store to be embraced.
We’re also advising retailers on the use of emerging channels, such as social media, iPhone apps and TV direct selling to ensure that their customer experiences are being managed across the full retail spectrum, wherever their customers choose to find them.
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