Measuring customer satisfaction to improve your retail store performance

During the past centuries, major retail firms have based their strategies on providing the largest offer at the lowest price... forgeting an essential factor : the customer experience.

This model used to work because customers didn't have much alternatives than going into physical shops. However, the rise of internet and technologies created new shopping behaviors.

Today, going into a physical shop is not a must-do but a choice. Retail businesses must face an essential change in order to survive : give cutomers the desire to come in store again.

Improve customer experience every step of the purchase process

In order to create a gap from competition, customer experience has been very important int he relationship between supply and demand. Create a strong customer experience becomes today the main goal and the priority for retail management.

Multi-channel, concept store, shop-in-shop,... initiatives have emerged to fluidify customer journey. Those strategies aim one single target : improve all direct contact points that a customer can have with your shop.

As an example, Stein and Ramaseshan (2016) have identified seven types of important contact points in store, going from in-store ambiance to interactions with employees or communication elements. Many criterias to take into account when building operational action plans.

Customer journey optimisation, source of profit for your retail business

A successful customer experience has a strong impact on customer's engagement and membership with the store. Indeed, a satisfied customer is a customer that spends more, that comes back and finally spend again. A higher average basket associated with higher attendance, means higher sales.

Anderson and Mittal (2000) have established that an increase of customer satisfaction by 1% goes with an increase of gross sales by 2,4% in average. With more than 20 millions customer feedbacks, Qwesteo has successeded to establish similar findings with business using our solution.

Adopting a customer centric approach seems to be logically a winning strategy. But for that, you will need to understand precisely your customers needs in order to take the right decisions.

Base your business strategies on precise numbers

To measure customer satisfaction influence on your gross sales, it is neccessary to gain access to satisfaction precise indicators and that can be comparable within time frames. You can not improve something that can not be measured.

Using smart terminals technology to collect customer feedbacks, Qwesto is in capacity to collect feedbacks objectively and in large volumes. So each store will be given a customer satisfaction score which takes in consideration all customer journey points of contact.

Based on this comprehensive analysis, managers are capable to take operational decisions and analyse the impact of customer satisfaction on the store sales month after month.