ICC/Decision Services Launches Second of its iPhone Applications – ConversionCalc

The latest in iPhone applications shows retailers the dollar value resulting from increasing their conversion rates.

New York, NY — ICC/Decison Services’ latest in iPhone applications shows retailers the dollar value resulting from increasing their conversion rates. ConversionCalc™ is the second of its iPhone applications available for free download on iTunes. ICC’s existing application, the UpSellCall™, was the first of its kind in the industry when it was launched this past summer. ICC/Decison Services is an international customer experience management company based in New York City.

Field management loves our calculators because they are portable and easily show store management the power of associate behavior. “We received great feedback on the UpSell Calc, our first application,” says David Rich, President/CEO of ICC/Decision Services. “Field management loves our calculators because they are portable and easily show store management the power of associate behavior. Corporate loves them because they point to increased revenue. It takes so much to get customers in the door in today’s marketplace,” continues Rich, “but many retailers don’t realize that increasing your conversion rates by only 2% can increase revenue by 10%. The ConversionCalc™ will quantify that lost opportunity for retailers and can produce calculations for a single store, district or the entire retail chain.”

Other features of the ConversionCalc™ include: easy one-screen operation; allows calculations over multiple time periods (days, months, quarters, etc); reveals the true dollar amount for increased associate performance.

Click here for more “ConversionCalc” conversion rates information, iPhone applications and download links.

About ICC/Decision Services
ICC/Decision Services was founded in 1979 to design and execute Customer Experience Management programs. ICC/Decision Services offers a wide range of qualitative and quantitative business tools, including mystery shopping, shopper intercepts, iPhone applications, conversion rates tools, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Clients include Coach, L.L. Bean, Rite Aid, 7-11, Foot Locker, CVS, Walmart and others. The company is headquartered at 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001, U.S.A. Phone: (800) 444-1717. More information is available at www.iccds.com.

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Tips for Holiday Retail Cheer

It’s a funny time in retail. The Holiday’s generally bring a surge of business as consumers splurge on gifts and other items to help brighten the season. However, this coming Holiday season feels very different. Nielsen tells us that consumers continue to make fewer trips to the store.

In this Progressive Grocer story, retailers are given 10 tips to help improve the retail shopping experience with some good old-fashioned cheer. It appears that strong sales incentives are required as part of the mix to drive the consumer toward a purchase. Almost one third of all purchases of CPG goods are driven by some kind of a deal. It is also reported that traffic at on-line coupon and reward sites are at an all time high. A few fairly common sense tactics can address the consumers need for an incentive and bring the spirit of the Holidays to the store. Here is that list in so many words:

1. More in-store tasting and cooking demos.
2. Aromatherapy.
3. Use local school bands or choirs to provide festive music.
4. Collect food bank donations.
5. Run holiday classic movie and TV shows on in-store media.
6. Offer holiday prize drawings for faithful customers.
7. Make donations to local charities. Encourage suppliers to do the same.
8. Holiday decorations.
9. Make sure your staff wears a smile and offers a greeting.
10. Keep the staff happy by allowing them to enjoy the Holidays as well.

It appears the mystery to consumer behavior in late 2009 and beyond is finding the right mix of tangible deals and incentives and mixing them with a store that provides a pleasant shopping environment. This savings/service cocktail can make a tasty cup of Holiday cheer.

Emphasizing the Experience

It is extremely important to measure and discover ways to integrate customer experience data across your organization. But it is even more important to realize that metrics will not in itself create great customer service. Sometimes we forget that the data is a measure of the experience in the first place, not the other way around.

That seems to be the theme of a blog authored by Bruce Tempkin on Customer Experience Matters. In it, Tempkin puts out his wish list for customer service in 2010. Here are his five wishes and some explanation:

“Forget about average handle times.” Focus more on delighting the customer rather than getting them off the line. Fast handle times often represent inattentive agents, not a quick and effective problem solution.

“Learn from every interaction.” Every chance you get to speak to your consumer is an opportunity to lean about their needs and how you can meet them. This is perhaps the most valuable kind of consumer research that you can acquire.

“Recover quickly and be proactive.” Even a good solution that is drawn-out or difficult can still lose a customer. A sense of urgency will always create goodwill and eliminating problems on the front end is even more effective. Many companies are finding great value in allowing customers to talk and help each other.

“Make customer service a product attribute.” When we design and develop new products, one of the first things we do is make a list of product attributes. This is the time to build in customer service, “as a key component of your offering.”

“Engage reps in customer experience transformation.” Transforming the customer experience is largely dependent on transforming your employees’ experience. The attitudes and experience of an empowered customer service staff are directly reflected upon the customer. If they enjoy their jobs, they will enjoy helping people as an end result, not just simply handling x number of calls.

Service metrics are important, but they are only a snap shot of the real job at hand. When choosing or designing any customer experience touch point, place the emphasis on delighting the customer, and everything else will fall into place.

Mystery Solved…If mystery shopping is so useful, why do retailers dislike it so much?

Mystery shopping is the best─no, make that the only-way retailers can get a truly objective view of the daily workings of their stores. When it’s done right, mystery shopping provides invaluable quantitative information about the customer experience that helps retailers optimize resources, motivate employees, and generally improve operations all around. Yet despite its potential value, mystery shopping is one of the most maligned metrics in the retail industry. How can this be?

The answer is simple. Mystery shopping is not a bad tool─it’s a tool that’s (all too often) used badly. There’s so much frustration out there resulting from poorly designed, badly maintained mystery shopping programs that the lousy reputation is no mystery at all. But to abandon mystery shopping because of a bad experience makes about as much sense as doing without a car because your last one happened to be a lemon.

How to make sure mystery shopping works for you

You spend a great deal of time and money designing customer service and product display protocols─elements that define your customer experience and provide crucial differentiation from your competition. A good mystery shopping program is the only way to get objective information about how well those carefully crafted strategies for service, display, and loss prevention are actually being implemented…and yet a bad mystery shopping program is almost sure to be a waste of time and money. How can you be sure you get a good one?

There’s no one answer to that question─just as there’s no one-size-fits-all mystery shopping program that can meet every company’s needs. However, the good news is that when mystery shopping programs are intelligently designed to meet a company’s specific needs, they are almost guaranteed to function beautifully. Working with an expert provider who can act as a true partner (not just a generic data-generating service) is the best way to ensure that you’ll get a customized program that’s right for you.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help determine whether your mystery shopping program─and your provider─are working for you:

Do you know exactly what data you need? Your provider should be able to help you pinpoint precisely what you want to learn from your program, and then help you define those goals in measurable terms. In addition, they should be able to suggest ways to integrate the needs of your different departments into an overall plan that minimizes redundancy and creates a true company-wide perspective.

Is your mystery shopping audit routinely refreshed to reflect new concerns and new processes? A mystery shopping audit form shouldn’t be “frozen in time”. What needs to be monitored today will probably be substantially different from what needed to be observed yesterday. And, if a mystery shopping program is correctly indexed with other information tools (like a customer satisfaction program), insights from these tools ought to be suggesting new issues for your mystery shoppers to observe and objectively audit.

Are you correlating your data with other metrics? Mystery shopping programs provide an objective view on how your stores are working, while customer feedback provides a subjective view. Taken together, these metrics create a complete picture of the customer experience in your stores, and allow you to make concrete changes to meet or exceed your customers’ expectations. As a simple example, let’s say a customer survey indicates dissatisfaction with your stores’ restrooms. If your mystery shopping data indicates that the restrooms were clean and stocked with toilet paper at 100% of visits but that no paper towels were available at 50%, you can conclude that paper towel availability is an important part of your customers’ expectations. You can also give specific direction to your employees to fix the problem (i.e., “keep the restrooms well stocked with paper towels”) rather than providing more general direction (i.e., “maintain the restrooms better”) that might not get to the real problem.
Because correlating mystery shopping data with other metrics is so important, using a provider that can analyze and help implement a wide range of customer service evaluation metrics can provide a great advantage. When the same provider is designing and administrating, for example, your mystery shopping program and your customer exit interviews, both programs can be designed to mesh well and to be optimally useful in tandem.

Are you properly “mining” your shopping results for greatest insight? Getting good data is important, but even the best mystery shopping data is useless unless it’s put to practical use. A good mystery shopping provider should be able to show you ways to translate your findings into measurable improvements in your bottom line. After all, pinpointing problem areas is only helpful to the degree that it allows you instigate positive change. Remember that your standards for performance improvement can─and should─be high: if your front-line employees are following procedures correctly 90% of the time, that’s not good enough. Interactions with employees are a critical part of your brand, and hitting brand standards only 90% of the time isn’t acceptable. (Just to put things into perspective: imagine if your company logo were printed in the right colors only 90% of the time!)

The bottom line has to be your bottom line

Simply put, a mystery shopping program is only as good as the data it produces─and the data is only good to the degree that it helps you make improvements to your business that impact your bottom line. Unfortunately, too many mystery shopping programs fail to produce good, usable data, and frustration is the inevitable result. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Good mystery shopping programs do exist, and choosing an expert mystery shopping provider─one who can truly be your partner in planning and execution─is your best guarantee of getting one.

Who Owns the Customer Relationship?

Ask any high profile brand marketing executive what their company’s most important asset is and they will dutifully answer, “The customer!” “Take care of the customer,” they will tell you, “and everything else will take care of itself.” The reality is that most organizations don’t even consider the customer relationship in their organizational structure.

Although all companies have some type of Customer Service Department and some have adopted customer experience programs to measure and react to the data, most do not have an integrated approach to apply the learning across the organization and back into the marketplace. What gets in the way of integration? If customer programs are used at all, they are used and isolated within organizational silos. See if this sounds familiar. Marketing owns the Customer Satisfaction Survey, Operations owns the Mystery Shop Program, Market Research owns the Customer Intercepts and Human Resources owns the Employee Engagement Program. But who owns the customer relationship?

The reality is that marketers don’t do this with any other asset in their company. The COO makes sure that the widget is the sole focus of the company from raw material to distribution. The CFO makes sure that every bean is counted along that path and knows exactly what the effect of a bean spent in Silo One means to Silo Four. Perhaps it is time to introduce the CCO, the Chief Customer Officer.

Don’t laugh. We have a high ranking executive to champion every other asset in the company, but we don’t have one whose sole purpose is to look out for the, “most important asset.” Companies are already moving quickly into the area of Social Media and you will soon see the advent of the Chief Community Officer, so the development of this new C-suite position makes sense and should not be out of the realm of possibility.

If the customer is truly your company’s greatest asset, then stewarding that relationship has to be more than lip service. The customer experience has to have a seat in the board room and filter its way all the way through the organization as an integrated strategy focus. Now that would be walking the walk.

ICC/Decision Services Launches UpSellCalc™ iPhone Application — Available Now for Free Download on iTunes

New York, NY July 14, 2009 — ICC/Decison Services (http://www.iccds.com), an international customer experience management company based in New York City, has developed an iphone application is the first of its kind in the industry. Now available for free download on ITunes, the UpSellCalc ™ will quickly and easily calculate the sales potential of increased suggestive selling.

Retailers, restaurants, financial institutions and brands deal too often in numbers and percentages when dollars are what really matter. In just a few simple steps, the “UpSellCalc ™” takes current suggestive selling numbers for a corporation and calculates the dollar value of the upsell on the sales floor, in the fitting rooms and at the register. Taking it one step further, UpSellCalc ™ will also calculate the dollar value should the frequency of suggestive selling increase by 5, 10 or even 20 percent. Other features of the UpSellCalc ™ include: easy one-screen operation, ability to calculate ROI for a specific store, district, region or across an entire retail chain, and key indicators of the true dollar amount for increased associate performance.

“Mobile technology is playing an increasing role in the retail and brand experience every day,” says David Rich, President/CEO of ICC/Decision Services. “At ICC, we believe first and foremost in showing our customers a return on investment, and with the UpSellCalc ™ we have developed yet another tool for delivering this information to them–in this case right into the palm of their hands. We look forward to introducing several other new tools in the mobile technology and social media arenas in the coming months.”

Click here for more “UpSellCalc” information and download links.

ABOUT ICC/DECISION SERVICES
ICC/Decision Services was founded in 1979 to design and execute Customer Experience Management programs. ICC/Decision Services offers a wide range of qualitative and quantitative business tools, including mystery shopping, shopper intercepts, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Clients include Coach, L.L. Bean, Rite Aid, 7-11, Foot Locker, Walmart and others. The company is headquartered at 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001, U.S.A. Phone: (800) 444-1717. More information is available at www.iccds.com.

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A Mystery Shopper Program at Work

One of the best tools in for managing a customer experience program is a mystery shopper. Often the concept is associated with uncovering negative customer service areas, but if you use the program effectively, it’s versatile benefits goes beyond reporting improvement areas.

Mystery shopping programs provide insight into both the great service and the substandard service. Newt Barrett wrote an excellent article on how Five Guys Burgers and Fries uses mystery shopping in their customer experience program. Barrett reveals the restaurant uses mystery shoppers to pinpoint staff members who excel at serving the customer. He claims the biggest effect is in how management leverages the mystery shopping report into an incentive program for employees.

Five Guys Burgers and Fries is an example of how to use mystery shoppers for brand and service management by to determining specific company goals and then creating a program that directly supports it. Whether it’s finding areas of improvement, pinpointing the outstanding staff, or measuring the effectiveness of brand promotions, mystery shopping is a versatile customer experience tool. If you are looking to maintain consistent standards of customer experience, the success of Five Guys Burgers and Fries indicates the value of mystery shopping.

The Significance of Quality Assurance in assuring successful service marketing

In its simplest form, Quality Assurance refers to the process in which a business entity (both manufacturer and service provider) retains the superior quality as promised to each consumer. More elaborately, any customer no matter how frequently purchases a service or product should get the same level of quality in every transaction.

Many companies term Quality Assurance in different names, but the underlying ideas are more or less similar in every case.

Quality Assurance and Service Industry:

Although quality assurance is critical to both service and manufacturing industry- however, the weight of Quality Assurance is emphasized higher in Service Industry. Why? – The answer lies in the main distinction between service and product, which is the intangibility of services. The contact between the consumer and the producer is higher in service marketing which asks for more careful execution of quality assurance measures.

Also the competition is fiercely growing in the service market for which companies need to focus and improvise their quality promises.

Implementing quality assurance in service industry:

Identifying the parameters to ensure quality in service market is not that easy, and most of the time the parameters differ from provider to provider. However, the following steps could be applicable as general approaches towards quality assurance in case of any service provider. These approaches have been defined as the DMAIC approaches as well. DMAIC stands for: Defining, Measurement, Analyzing, Improvement and Controlling.

Identification of customer expectation:
A successful marketing approach starts with the identification of the target market and their needs. While in quality assurance the company has to set a standard for service offerings, first they have to identify the expectation of the market. Any standard bar set below the level of market expectation will not suffice.

Market research, customer surveys, feedback forms these are the tools aiding in identification of customer expectation.

Determination of standards:
While determining the standards, the ceiling is set by the mission and vision of the company whereas the floor is set by the market expectation. This means, the standard of quality promise has to be set keeping the mission and vision of the company and can never be set below the market expectation. A company or service entity must provide their basic services at the least, like: in case of any restaurant the least promise they can make for quality maintenance is to provide clean food. Customer surveys sometimes help in determination of standards- for example a company may decide to retain 90% of the customer satisfaction as found in the surveys.

Measurement of performance:
Then the existing performance standard has to be measured and matched with the adopted standard in order to figure out the differences between them.

Analyzing:
Now, when the gaps between the standard and the current performance have been determined, the reasons giving in to the gaps should be analyzed. The analysis has to be thorough, extensive and reflective of the market scenario. This is why in most of the companies; they delegate the duty to a separate unit called Quality Assurance.

Planning:
After, the causes and effects of the gaps have been analyzed; proper plan should be made in order to overcome these. Management can form different teams in order to plan for the best possible strategy for quality assurance.

Controlling:
Without constant performance up to the standard, there is actually no point in implementing any strategy. To ensure this consistency- proper control over the process is to be exercised.

By following the aforementioned steps, quality assurance can be given to customers, which will eventually lead to a higher customer retention.

Creating and Sustaining Interest in Mystery Shopping

There are many factors that work together to make a mystery shopping program successful. However, no matter how much support your program receives from management, it will not be sustainable, consistent and successful without the full participation of your frontline staff.

Read more…

Being Proactive

So how do the greatest service organizations reprioritize their corporate culture by making just one simple change? They shift their focus from being reactive to being proactive. Rather than waiting for problems to happen, and then fixing them, they look for potential problems that can be prevented before they happen.

Read more…