When it comes to building loyalty and customer satisfaction in grocery stores, there are a number of moving elements to consider.
For grocery stores, this is especially true as a customer’s experience can vary depending on where produce is sourced, how helpful staff are, what brands are carried, how fresh the hot bar is and so on. Like any modern day business, grocery stores have to continuously adapt to changing customer preferences and expectations in order to build long term brand advocates.
In this blog post, we uncover the top 3 ways to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty within your grocery store.
Listen to Customers Across Channels
Achieving customer satisfaction and loyalty starts with listening.
Today, customers have a lot on their mind. They have food preferences, cleanliness expectations and feelings about what type of service they’d like. However, not many customers will go out of their way to tell you.
Asking customers questions or prompting them with a survey during multiple touch-points, can help you listen and understand customer needs and experience. In addition, having a multi-channel approach, especially across different touch-points, can help you reach a greater number of customers – including those not in store who didn’t make a purchase.
Web feedback and in-app channels for instance, allow you to gather insight while the customer is on your website or app. Having surveys or a form for communication then becomes imperative to receive an optimal amount of survey responses.
Similarly, conversations both on social media and web channels can offer a treasure trove of unstructured CX feedback – perfect for understanding the customers overall sentiment. This is a big opportunity to gain insight as customers are most likely already discussing your brand online. Having a technology like a Customer Engagement Management platform that can assist you with dissecting conversations can help big time by analyzing high volumes of unstructured feedback that can be time consuming. Further, a CEM can analyze customer text so you can better understand how a customer is feeling and how to respond effectively.
By leveraging a customer experience (CX) platform, you can listen to customers efficiently and identify trends that impact several functions across the business. From operations, customer service, merchandising, marketing and more, a CX platform can provide meaningful insight on where budget, resources and time should be spent. Perhaps something wasn’t prepared fresh, or perhaps a new item is really popular and well received. Using text analytics, your team can see immediate customer sentiment, so you can make modifications to match expectations.
Respond Promptly On Preferred Channels
When customers submit their feedback they want to feel like their response means something.
For grocery stores in particular, it’s important to respond to customers in a quick and efficient manner. Doing so, demonstrates that you take feedback seriously and strive to put the customer first. Today, there are a number of grocery stores on the market offering the same produce, brands and experience. Responding to customers sets you apart from competitors because it builds a relationship of trust and confidence, leading to greater loyalty.
When designing your customer survey, consider the type of channel the customer wishes to communicate on. For instance, maybe they filled out the survey in-store on a kiosk, but they want your response via text, as they’re busy and always on the-go. Taking the time to pose a final question on your survey such as; “How would you like us to reach out in the future?” can help you better tailor your messages to the customer and increase fluid communication moving forward.
Empower Frontline Employees
Empowering employees is crucial to gain and maintain customer loyalty. It’s about having strong, enthusiastic employees who are excited about their job and wowing the customer.
To empower employees, provide real-time feedback so they can immediately improve their performance and address any concerns while the customer is on-location. Let employees know how they’re doing throughout the day, praise them when they excel and coach them when needed. This, much like listening to customers, can be streamlined with the right technology.
With a customer experience platform like Loop, employees can download an app that equips them with access to live feedback no matter where they are in store. This allows them to collaborate and share context with other employees across the organization to solve customer queries effectively. In addition, it helps create a seamless experience for the customer, as all the information is captured in the conversation so customers don’t have to constantly repeat themselves.
Lastly, a customer experience platform can aid businesses by providing management with real-time dashboards and analytics. Customer loyalty is all about providing an unparalleled experience and with tangible data on happy guests, cleanliness, employee friendliness, and more you can constantly improve. Further, data can easily be accessible on visualization tools such as heatmaps and scoreboards, so employees can focus on taking action and avoid struggling with the data.
