If You Want to Improve Your Customer’s Experience, Stop Looking at Your Scores. Do This Instead

Most retailers use some type of customer satisfaction survey to help gain an understanding of their customer’s thoughts about their shopping experience. Those surveys translate into a score that every manager receives through either a dashboard or an email report. Then, countless hours are no doubt spent on conference calls or discussions during store visits with District Managers or above about those reports. Most conversations are centered on the score from the surveys. I believe that misses the point.Whether your company uses a customer satisfaction score (usually a 5, 7, or 10 point scale where only the top box counts) or you use a Net Promoter score (calculating the difference between ‘promoters’ (9,10) and ‘Detractors’ (1-6)) they still equate to a score. Those are what, we as leaders, tend to concentrate on - the score.The concern I have is we spend our time focused on the score from the report and not getting to an understanding of what the customer was feeling during their visit. Essentially, WHY did the customer score us in that way?Customers see their choices as Highly Satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied, or Highly Dissatisfied. Those seem reasonable, but few of us as consumers actually express ourselves in those terms when discussing our experiences with others. If we are talking to a friend, we might say, “wow that was a really great experience, that was unique, and the employees were so helpful.” While that translates to ‘highly satisfied’ the score only captures a portion of the emotion the customer is feeling. If the experience is poor, we would tell our friends, “they were so rude, no one wanted to help, all they wanted to do was talk to each other. I couldn’t find what I was looking for and ended up only getting 1 of the things I needed.”If you are fortunate enough to have a comments section as part of your survey, you may get some customer sentiment by reading the comments and finding the action points from their scoring rationale. I find that there is significantly more value in reading comments from customers than in just studying the score from the customer. (And yes, there are those frustrating moments when the customer's comments don’t match the score they gave you. I’ll spare you the headache of sending a note to your DM or someone else asking to change the rating - it won’t happen. It sucks, but move on and take the comments for the value they offer and avoid getting caught up in the score. The vast majority of surveys will match correctly and as you get more, that occasional error has less impact anyway.)Even if you do not capture customer comments, any additional information from the surveys can point you in a direction to understand from a customer perspective better. In my experience, there are common areas of the visit that become the ‘key drivers’ of how customers rate their shopping trip. These are friendliness of your staff, availability of your staff, knowledge of your staff, and the checkout process. The checkout process is almost always a heavily weighted factor in customers satisfaction. If there is no additional information from a survey and you want to impact the customer experience in your store positively - start there.Staring at a score on a screen or piece of paper will never yield you better results. Spend time on your floor observing and being honest with yourself and your team. Move beyond thinking of the results as a score and begin to see it as a feeling. Place yourself in the shoes of a customer, observe interactions in your store, and ask, “what is the customer feeling right now?” A person’s body language will often give that away. It is pretty easy to spot that frustrated customer who has been waiting in line for more than 3 minutes.The honest part comes when you challenge yourself to remove all of your known obstacles - someone called out sick today, you received extra merchandise on your delivery unexpectedly, or I don’t have enough payroll (there is never enough payroll). All of those factors may be true, but your customer doesn’t care. They care about their time, their purchase, their experience. While difficult, we need to solve for that. How can you adjust your schedule? How could you train your team differently? How can you shift priorities so that everyone in your location is always placing the customer’s experience first?There are no easy answers for these. They will require thinking differently and expanding the horizons of your other leaders and team members to see beyond the status quo and explore new options for how you manage your business on a day-to-day basis. Step one of that process is to look beyond the numbers of your reports and begin to understand the feelings of your customers while they are in your location. Then take action on what matters most. (Hint: your scores will improve too)What new ideas will you implement to learn more about the feelings of your customers and spend less time looking at a score? Share your thoughts in the comments section.Join other retail leaders in continuing their development journey with Effective Retail Leader.com. 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