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13 recommendations to help retail customers find your outlets

How easily can your customers find you on the High Street?

Imagine that you want to visit a branch of Big Retail Company, but don’t know where the nearest store is. Searching on the internet, you land on the corporate website. Can you find the answer to your question?

I’ve looked at 14 FTSE100 companies who have a High Street or out-of-town presence to find out how easily a retail customer could find their nearest outlet using the corporate site. [Read more…] about 13 recommendations to help retail customers find your outlets

Darling, you’ve changed

online surveyAfter breakfast this morning, my daughter asked me not to buy what has been her favourite brand of gluten free pains au chocolat any more. Apparently, they’ve changed the recipe, and she doesn’t like them any more.

Apart from the minor domestic issues (what to source instead?) this raises a big question in my mind.

For these products – products which are rare, if not unique, and for which the market is small but necessarily very loyal – why not ask for customer feedback, and make it easy to provide?

Without this feedback, the company has no idea why one of its loyal customers has gone, and it is missing out on an opportunity.

Yes, I know that the company no doubt believes the new recipe is an improvement (even if only in production costs not taste) and that there may be new customers gained who do like the new version. But in a relatively small market like this one, every customer counts.

It would be easy to add a feedback blog, or an online survey, so that customers could tell the company what they thought, and perhaps email customers after a recipe change asking for feedback (even better if you can target those who buy that particular product), with a link to the blog/survey.

I saw a different gluten free manufacturer on Twitter this morning, asking people for their opinions on gluten free lunchtime options. It can be done…

Many corporate websites now ask for feedback, usually via a popup survey request – occasionally via a link in a sidebar. Although many people may click the No Thanks button, anyone who feels strongly has the opportunity to respond – and that in itself may assuage some of the irritation felt towards the brand.

What are you doing to get feedback from users when you make a change?

Customers Targeted via Email Marketing

How do you reach your customers for your business? What methods do you use to market your products or services to them? Do you use a mix of traditional methods plus web-savvy strategies? The Internet has grown to such a capacity that email marketing has now become a more preferred method of targeting and reaching customers about your service. No, it’s not spammy, only if you don’t know how to send a targeted email.

But, what better way to reach today’s savvy online peruser than in email? I for one simply love the convenience and flexibility that comes with being able to check my email and send a text from my fingertips within minutes. Today’s online trafficker needs something that will work on their schedule and during their flexible and convenient times.

I have signed up (and still do) for several online customer shopping alerts for the things and consumables that interest me:

  1. children’s clothing sales
  2. information on asthma, and asthma-related illness (my 5 year old suffers with it)
  3. marketing (business)
  4. media (business)
  5. professional speaking (business)

…and the list goes on and on. There are so many alerts and email subscriptions that I have created folders to help me keep them all straight! Online consumers want information that is readily available, interesting, engaging, insightful and ready. This is what drives the Internet and makes it so wonderfully enticing. The readiness of information can spoil one so to the point that we actually become impatient when our browser takes longer than 5 seconds to load!

ExactTarget and Pier 1 are targeting companies via an email campaign that is sure to get lots of hits if not inquisitive visitors. But, they’re not so novel in their approach, right? Of course not. Email marketing has been around and has become popular for quite some time. But what ExactTarget and Pier 1 are doing that catches one’s attention is the tag-team marketing efforts.

Again, not so novel, but just think about the potential that your company could have from dual team or triple team efforts in your marketing campaign. Although corporations generally do not do much marketing in terms of flash, they do still look for ways to get their message out. Teaming up with other businesses or even individuals who complement what you’re doing can actually be beneficial.

What services do you offer that would or could complement other businesses? How conducive is your corporation to co-marketing or targeting a particular niche market? Would it work for you? Why or why not?



New website? What have you missed?

no-entry

So you’ve developed a shiny new website to perform a particular function for your customers. It replaces a working, but rather visually dated, site.

What are the most important things to do before you put it live?

Well, testing it, for one thing. Ensuring that you have a rollback option, so that you can put the previous version back up if you need to, is also important. And checking that all your surrounding processes still work OK is a third.

I recently had cause to log in to a particular site (let’s call this X), which is owned by a large company (let’s call them A). I noticed that the design of the site had changed since I’d last logged in 10 days ago – all the content had been removed from the home page, leaving only two options: log in, or create a new account. No other links or text on the page at all…

So I tried – and failed – to log in. I tried again. I tried resetting the password, several times. Still nothing worked.

So I called company A, whose customer service team put me through to the department responsible for X. Sadly, the call went to an answerphone message, which said: check the FAQ on site X [remember that all content on X is now behind the login page, which doesn’t work] or call company A.

Since there are no contact details or any other information available on site X, I have no option but to keep trying to call company A.

Having looped through this several times in the last few days, one of the customer service team at company A managed to get through to the X department, who said something like: “oh yes, there’s a problem with site X, we’re working on a fix and it should be back up in 4 days”. That is, 4 days from today, not from the day when the problem was first observed – which, if I were the first person to spot it, was 4 days ago.

That’s at least 8 days that website X is non-functional.

Lessons to be learned?

  • Test a new website properly. Being able to log in is pretty fundamental, particularly if there’s nothing else available
  • Ideally, be able to restore the old version if the new version fails in the first few days
  • Check that all other offline procedures and instructions fit in with the new site (change management 101). Don’t forget to replace that answerphone message…

And, if possible, please provide contact details.

Customer Journey Maps: Taking the Scenic Route

Most of us are very well connected these days.

I’m not talking about knowing the right people, but about technology—smartphones, tablets, and laptops give us a lot of mobility and potential to do research and shop from just about anywhere. That is why it is important for businesses to show a unified front when it comes to customer experience. Your site should look the same and have the same functionality no matter what device you’re using.

The path to purchase isn’t straight and narrow, it’s now a winding path— or maybe stepping stones are a better analogy, as we hop between devices—however, companies can use their own data to develop a customer journey map that leads customers back to purchase.

There are other things that you can do in order to help visitors to buy your products:

  • Making sure your site loads quickly on all devices is a big one. The attention span of today’s shopper is apparently shorter than that of a goldfish, which is 9 seconds. That’s not because consumers are stupid; quite the opposite—they know what they want and they know that they can find it faster somewhere else if your site isn’t loading quickly enough.
  • You can also make shopping more personalized using real-time data and marketing techniques. This allows for systematically responding to your customers while they are on your site depending on their behaviour, and can increase conversion rates by up to 26%.

The customer journey is not always a short and sweet process but using techniques like these you can help increase sales and conversions on your site.

I came across this infographic, which I thought you’d enjoy, from Signal.co. Read their post, too; it’s very interesting. I know I switch between devices all the time, depending on where I am; and I double-screen too…

And, of course, this doesn’t apply only to B2C customer journeys.

signal-cross-device-purchase-journey-outline

Customer Service, Scripts and the Other Lucys

problem

How many other people have the same name as you?

There are a lot of Lucy Nixons. As well as several in the UK, I know there’s an estate agent in America, as well as a Lucy who does equine Reiki treatment. In Australia there’s an illustrator and a cyclist… and there must be more.

Plenty of scope for confusion, especially since we obviously have similar email addresses. In recent weeks I have:

  • fended off multiple invitations to join TV shoots as a makeup artist (I get the shooting schedules, including which star is in which taxi and where they are going)
  • received the cyclist’s race results
  • apparently passed an interview and been signed up as a representative of a home sales beauty company
  • and I regularly get confirmation from a well-known pizza company of the food ordered by a Lucy who lives 230 miles away from me. She always has the same: she likes to create her own pizza (with lots of meat), and have it with doughnuts and cherry coke. I don’t eat meat, and prefer diet coke…

It must happen to some of you too, surely?

Mistakes happen to us all, and I don’t mind emailing the cyclist’s coach to explain that I’m several decades older than her athlete and on the wrong continent. I do understand that mistakes happen. And I do my best to sort it out – I don’t like to think that people are missing out on work, for instance, because the emails have gone to the wrong place.

But it seems that customer services from some big companies just can’t cope when someone who isn’t a customer phones up to try and rectify a mistake.

I’ve now phoned the beauty company multiple times, but their customer services teams don’t know what to do. Responses vary:

  • I’ll report it to the fraud team
  • I’ll deal with it immediately (weeks ago – no action taken)
  • I’ll put you through to my supervisor (followed by hanging up on me)
  • And the most honest of all: they tell me they can’t take any action because I’m not the account holder.

Although I know the account number and order numbers of one of the other Lucys, since I’ve received everything including her contract agreement, I’m going to fail security because my address, phone number and date of birth are never going to match hers, no matter how many times they ask. Because I’m not her, and that’s why I’m calling.

All I want them to do is to contact the Other Lucy and ask for her correct email address. They obviously have her home address and phone number, so it shouldn’t be hard…

So here’s the thing: can your processes handle a mistake of this type? Can your customer service team step away from the script and pro-actively resolve a problem? Because if not, you may find that they’re frustrating people who aren’t even their customers, and who are only trying to help.

And—the other Lucys? If you’re out there, please tell them what your real email address is.

*** update ***

Today I received an email from the beauty company to let The Other Lucy know that she owed them some money. So today’s call with their customer service went a lot better… I explained (yet again) that I wasn’t their representative and wasn’t going to pay this bill. I believe that they are now trying to contact her to ask her to change her email address.