Job Title:

Client Account Manager: Consumer & Market Research – Dundalk

About the Company:

Customer Perceptions Ltd. is a consumer and market research company based in Dundalk, Co. Louth and has been in business since 1995. Our specialist services include: Mystery Shopping Programmes, Client Satisfaction surveys, Web based surveys and Training and Consultancy (primarily in Customer Service). We work with clients in the financial, FMCG, Hospitality/Tourism and Telecommunications sectors.

We currently employ a team of 10 and also manage a base of 5000 to 6000 field researchers/mystery shoppers.

Job Description:

A Client Account Manager, working in Customer Perceptions Ltd. manages a client portfolio including large and smaller clients and occasional works jointly with other Account Managers on some larger programmes.

The Account Manager is responsible for every aspect of the client programme i.e. initial contact, programme set up and design (e.g. questionnaire/template creation, mystery shopper guidelines), managing the field work, proofing reports, through to presentation of results and analysis to the client.

The Account Manager works closely with the General Manager, other Account Managers and our Assessor Manager (who looks after our base of field researchers/mystery shoppers).

Requirements:

• At least 5 years office/administration experience (preferably an open office environment).
• Previous client experience (i.e. managing client accounts/programmes).
• Previous experience of working in a team.
• Excellent communication, including telephone and written skills.
• Significant experience/knowledge in using excel, word, outlook and PowerPoint.
• Own a car with a full driving license.

Personal Qualities:

• Strong team player
• Self-Motivated
• Ability to work unsupervised
• Good time management skills and organised
• Ability to multitask on the job

 

Other information:

If selected for interview you will be required to bring examples of recent reports, assignment or presentations that you have done and be prepared to conduct a short 5 minute presentation on your CV.

6 Ways Mystery Shopping Can Benefit your Business.

Micheal Le Boeuf (1987) outlined the following statistics in his opening pages ‘Something to think about….’ which demonstrates the vital importance of both knowing and listening to customers which are still as important to today’s business environment as ever before.

1. A typical business hears from only 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers. The other 96 percent just quietly go away and 91 percent will never come back. That represents a serious financial loss for companies whose people don’t know how to treat customers, and a tremendous gain to those that do.

2. A survey on “why customers quit” found the following:

3% move away

5% develop other friendships

9% leave for competitive reasons

14% are dissatisfied with the product

68% quit because of an attitude of indifference towards the customers by the owner, manager or some employee

3. A typical dissatisfied customer will tell 8 to 10 people about his problem. One in five will tell twenty. It takes twelve positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident.

4. Seven out of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour. If you resolve it on the spot, 95% will do business with you again. On average, a satisfied complainer will tell five people about the problem and how it was satisfactorily resolved.

5. The average business spends six times more to attract new customers than it does to keep old ones. Yet customer loyalty is in most cases worth ten times the price of a single purchase.

The study was conducted in 1987, but the conclusions you can draw from it are as relevant today as ever. So, just to spell it out, here’s how mystery shopping can benefit your business and make some effort towards fighting the tide suggested by Le Boeuf’s study, based on Moorehead et al (1998):

1. Mystery Shopping identifies performance-related behavioural events. As we’ve seen in the previous study, most customers with an issue simply won’t tell you about it. Mystery shopping gives you a customer experienced and coached in spotting issues in your service who is guaranteed to report it back to you. You need to know what the problems are before you can fix them, and mystery shopping is a cost-effective and quick way to gain those insights.

2. Mystery Shopping measures the baseline performance of your staff; that is how frequently each staff member adheres to the desired organisational behaviour. Mystery shopping measures the occurrence of each behaviour over time. This allows management to view trends of each of the behaviours, such as the frequency of when the desired behaviour is adhered to and not adhered to (Customer Perceptions 2010). For example a report may show that staff are more likely to greet customers more frequently in the morning compared to in the evening. Again, once you know, you can take steps to remedy.

3. It helps identify the consequences of that performance. This means both from the point of view of staff members (what could some simple upselling questions do for their sales figures, for example) and the business as a whole – what’s the correlation between particular variables such as the correct greeting or profiling questions and the customer’s likelihood to purchase, or return, or recommend?

4. It creates the data vital to developing an appropriate intervention strategy. Depending on the results, there may be any number of intervention strategies that might be required to address issues in the business. Once you have the data, you can begin to address it. You might want to introduce incentives, bonus schemes or even simply recognition (which is often surprisingly effective in itself) for successful changes in staff behaviours.

5. Evaluate for performance improvement. Finally, mystery shopping is a good way to test the effectiveness of any of the actions you take. It’s not simply the case that we send one person into your store and hand over a document of nitpicks or complaints. We work with all our clients to produce tailored mystery shopping programmes conducive to practical actions after the fact, which themselves will be measurable in multiple ways.

We know how to build a mystery shopping programme (keep an eye on our blog here, we can certainly share some of the first principals), and we know how to take the raw data and make it useful. Mystery shopping is the most effective ways to gain the data about your own business that otherwise would be happening under the water line. If you want to discuss it with us, or how it might help your business, you can get in contact with us here.

Tips for best practice in telephone customer care.

Customer care is a cornerstone of every industry. If you’re selling a product or providing a service, the person or organisation who is buying should always be at the forefront of your mind. In this day and age, there’s a lot of ways that customers can make first contact – through social media, via a website – but the old-fashioned phone is still one of the most common, and telephone customer care gives a real opportunity to impress potential customers with your competence, approachability and professionalism. At Customer Perceptions we’ve spent the past 20 years researching every conceivable aspect of customer care, and based on this we’ve come up with some tips to make that initial phone call really work for your business. Here they are:

1)      Prompt Response – your target should be that every phone call to your organisation is answered within 3 rings. Almost immediately. Don’t leave customers hanging on the other end of a line, wondering what’s happening on your end. If you’re in a meeting, or for any reason can’t reach the phone on time, have a voicemail service set up, make sure it’s personalised and always, but always, but always get back to the caller. And get back within 24 hours.

2)      Use a professional greeting – include your name and your business name. Say it promptly, say it clearly. Give callers the essential information straight away, don’t make them have to ask.

3)      Establish if the caller is an existing customer – depending on the size of your organisation this may be self-evidently obvious or may require a direct question. Whichever it is, make sure you establish this. Obviously how you handle a call with a new customer (be friendly, welcoming, approachable, informative, establish needs) is very different to how you handle a call with an existing customer (be familiar with their needs, ask relevant questions re: the product or service which you’ve provided, be open to feedback and ready to suggest next steps), so establish it early on.

4)      Establish the customer needs – very much related to the last point, this one – find out what the customer is calling about. Find out which of your products or services are going meet their needs (this might not be the product/service they feel it is; you’re the expert, guide them if they’ve got it wrong). This is an initial phone call, obviously if there’s a great deal of detail or documentation required (as, depending on your business, there might be), you shouldn’t go into it all there and then, but get enough information to allow you to prepare effectively for any proper meetings or consultations that might be required, and to allow you set the customer’s expectations. Speaking of which:

5)      Prepare your customer/set their expectations: very basic one, this. Make sure, by the time your customer puts down their phone, they understand the response times involved, any documentation or materials required for any follow-up face-to-face meetings, and basically (but importantly) where the office is. This is important – if the next meeting goes well, there’s the chance to close the deal there and then. If they’re not prepared that’s unlikely. Ensure as best you can they are prepared.

6)      Follow up on the call! Don’t just leave moving forward entirely up to the customer. Always follow up if you don’t hear back. If there’s a subsequent meeting to be arranged, call or at the very least text with a reminder.

 

The initial phone contact with your company is a crucial component of any customer’s dealings with your business. Do it well, do it properly and don’t waste it.

4 Simple Rules to Get That Business!

 

Here at Customer Perceptions, we do mystery shopping and consumer consultancy for a wide range of industries and sectors. We recently completed a study of financial brokers in Ireland, and the customer experience across the sector. While mapping the customer journey for clients of financial brokers (including by sending our mystery shoppers out to various businesses around the country), we came across several points of interest applicable across a wide range of businesses. There was a lot of useful information collated during the study, but one of the most interesting was the behaviour of the agents at the end and after the consultuation/appointment/call-it-what-you-will. Closing the deal is a crucial step on the customer journey and we want to take some time to address it with you. To that end, we’ve put together four simple steps that will help you bring a consultation to a close successfully, and will make it as easy as possible to close that sale:

Summarise the discussion for the customer, ensure they have clearly understood what you’ve explained to them. Ask them if they have any questions and review anything they have queries about.

Summarise the discussion for the customer, ensure they have clearly understood what you’ve explained to them. Ask them if they have any questions and review anything they have queries about.

Give the customer something tangible to take away with them. Maybe it’s because if someone has a leaflet or printout they’re more likely to review what was covered, maybe it’s simply that a document lying around the house keeps the consultation at the forefront of their mind, but customers are more likely to proceed if they have some kind of documentation to take away with them. Don’t swamp them with information, but a simple document outlining the recommendations along with their features and benefits is something no client or potential client should leave a consultation without.

Ask for the business. This is a very basic one, but in almost half our mystery shopper consultations it wasn’t done. Ask the customer if they want to proceed on the spot. If yes, that’s great! If no, find out why. What are the customer’s barriers and concerns? Address them! Even if they don’t proceed there and then with the application, do not allow them to walk out the door without having addressed these issues. You can be assured your competitors will  address them.

I’m sure these steps seem simple common sense to most of you, but what’s surprising is how often they simply aren’t followed. The figures returned in our study show a very patchy picture as to how consistently these simple, effective techniques are coming into play. When dealing with a customer and bringing a consultation to a close, don’t forget them. Closing the deal won’t happen without properly meeting the customer’s expectations.

The best consultation or presentation or client relationship in the world can be thrown away at the last hurdle. Keep these steps at the forefront of your mind, and don’t let that happen!

 

4 Simple Ways To Encourage City Centre Shopping

“The death of the high street” is an expression we’ve all heard – it’s much discussed on talk radio, in the print media, everywhere. It’s certainly true that in recent years (recent decades even) the central importance of the high street to ordinary peoples’ shopping habits has declined significantly, the attraction of large out-of-town shopping centres and retail parks with the big-brand retailers and ample parking seeming impossible to compete against. Regional towns all over Ireland and the UK (where we predominantly do our business) have felt the effect. So, since our job is to understand what your customers want and what they’re looking for, we sent some of our avid consumer researchers to Limerick, a regional city in Ireland, to find out exactly what draws people to spend their money in the city centre, and what forces are working against them doing so. From the results of that survey, we’ve come up with a handful of suggestions to help maximise your attractiveness to potential customers. Some of them are immediately actionable by any business, some may require a bit more organisation and cooperation. We feel all of them are worthwhile.

1)      Have an Online Presence.

I mentioned above that we conducted our survey in Limerick City. I also mentioned the much-discussed competition between the city centre and the retail parks/shopping centres on the outskirts of towns all over these islands. It’s perhaps surprising that in our survey, when asked about alternative shopping locations, of our 723 respondents, only 12.07% mentioned The Crescent, Limerick’s own manifestation of the large, non-central shopping centre. On the other hand, 45.51% mentioned online shopping as an alternative. The message is clear – you have to attract people from the web.

This doesn’t have to be a major investment. There are large retail chains developing shopping apps that guide you around their stores using your mobile phone, and specifically message customers updates on offers, relevant products etc. Even if that level of sophistication is out of reach (as it may well be for most high-street non-chain businesses), systems like WordPress have put slick, professional websites in the reach of even small businesses, and made them simple to adapt and update along with business needs. If almost half of the people we surveyed (by far the largest percentage, the others naming a mish-mash of other towns and cities) cited online retailing as their most immediate other option, then at the very least a Facebook page and Twitter account (regularly monitored and updated) is a must.

2)      Know What Customers Want.

This should almost go without saying, but it is an absolutely crucial factor, so we’ll say it again just in case. When we surveyed shoppers in Limerick as to how often they shop in the city centre, the largest single cohort of respondents replied once a month (34.19%). While the next largest group replied once a week (28.21%) when asked about what large or smaller retailers they would want to see in the area they replied M&S (60.4%), Zara (43.79%), Pandora (35.47%) and Sketchers (37.02%). Of the top brands mentioned only M&S is a grocery retailer, for example. Combined with the prominence of once-a-month visitors, it seems the days of a city centre being the venue for “the big weekly shop” are for better or worse at an end.

Fashion (and branded fashion especially) is what people come into the city centres for, and they’re looking for the kind of service provided by the big retailers. Luxury items, a day out for a little retail therapy – that’s what people look for on the high street (47.57% of respondents suggested that “the atmosphere” was one of the main reasons they shopped in the city centre). The sundries and practicalities of daily life they get in their main shop – that’s not what they’re using the high street for.

Ask yourself – to what extent does my business meet these requirements? To what extent am I giving these things (these things being exactly what my customers are looking for) to the people who walk by and come inside my business?

3)      Accessibility

We come now to issues that your customers have with high street shopping that can’t necessarily be addressed by a single business. The first and most obvious of these is parking; it was the largest single minus point for our respondents, with 49.7% of people surveyed mentioning it as a drawback. Several of the respondents specifically mentioned the cost of pay parking as a factor that would prevent them from shopping in the city centre.

Obviously individual retailers have a limited amount of deciding power in the cost of high-street parking, but as an issue, campaigns to lower the cost (or abolish it) would be time well spent. It is an issue that local chambers of commerce should never let slip too far down the agenda, and specific campaigns should be given all the support necessary to make an impact on those who are deciding this issue. In one fell swoop almost half of the respondents could be made a little happier (and therefore more likely to shop) by addressing this single issue.

4)      Atmosphere/Safety.

This is an interesting one. As I mentioned above, 47.57% of respondents cited “the atmosphere” as one of the best things about city-centre shopping. However, in the same survey, 24.16% of people cited “atmosphere/safety” as a drawback. It’s an interesting double-edge in the survey, and is worth consideration. In response to the question of what people don’t like about the city, certain issues were raised specifically by respondents. Several people cited begging as real turn-off, others the prevalence of empty or derelict shop fronts.

Again, this is an issue that a single business alone can’t address – atmosphere is a delicate thing to construct, so empty shop fronts should be kept in good repair, and as far as possible anti-social behaviour (loitering and begging) should be discouraged. It’s more than just a simple case of “ruining the atmosphere” – people actually feel their safety is lessened by these factors. Chambers of Commerce have a key role in facilitating the addressing of these issues, and again, local campaigns are an unavoidable strategy.

Essentially, in order for your city-centre business to thrive, two things are absolutely necessary – the facilitation of your customers finding your product (via web-presence, and the all-important tactic of taking on board what your customers are looking for), and broader organisation and a genuine commitment to cooperation and change among high-street retailers to address the issues beyond your immediate control.

Even when you don’t necessarily have control, influence can be a powerful thing in itself.

Improving Your Business’s Performance Through People.

We’ve been in the mystery shopping and consumer research business for 20 years. One of the fruits of this kind of work (apart from helping businesses large and small across Ireland and the UK to identify, tackle and resolve issues inhibiting their success) is that we now sit on a goldmine of useful business information. Over the past few months we’ve been blogging consistently with some of that information (they’re all here).

What’s always most surprising to us, however, is not the myriad variety of different complaints or issues that our mystery shoppers identify; on the contrary – again and again we find the same issues raising their head. Again and again we find ourselves advising different businesses on the most effective and efficient ways of resolving the same old issues, and if you’ve read any of our blogs  you’ll find that one key element of your business comes up as the solution again and again – staff behaviours and competencies.

It’s not, of course, that people don’t know their business or employees don’t value their jobs. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of getting people in the habit of upselling, or approaching customers, or effectively identifying customer needs once they have – there’s a lot of simple, effective tricks that staff can be trained in to help any business gain the edge over its competitors. The quality of that training, and making it stick – that can be an issue in itself. Here’s 5 simple rules to keep at the forefront of your mind when organising or carrying out staff training to ensure it’s as effective as it can be, and to ensure it will result in lasting value for your business:

1. Variety of Training Materials: People don’t learn well when they’re bored. You need to keep the training varied and interesting, and a good way to do that is to introduce little pieces of video, of images – anything to break up what would otherwise be monotony. Fundamentally, if you engage people and keep them interested in the information and competencies you’re trying to impart, you’ll find it’ll be easier for everyone and be more likely to have lasting results.
2. Don’t Lecture: Staff training shouldn’t mimic for your employees the worst elements of their past college experiences. This is very much related to the previous point: you want to engage people, not turn them off. At its worst, staff training can devolve for your employees into a long, boring way of getting away from the shop floor for a few hours. That experience does no good for anyone. Training material and information should be relevant to your staff, should be immediately actionable for them and very importantly – your employees should be involved and contributing at all times.
3. Not Enough Training: Here’s an interesting statistic – staff leaving a company in the first year of employment is four times more likely in a company offering poor or no training. Direct replacement costs can reach 50-60% of the staff salary. Quite apart from encouraging staff competencies and ensuring consistent adoption of best practice across your organisation, that’s a bottom-line figure that should cause very serious pause for thought.
4. How Do People Learn? People learn best when digesting bite-size chunks of information. That’s not some terrible character flaw in the younger generation, it’s simply a fact of life (don’t believe me? There’s an interesting article here). Reams and reams of facts and statistics aren’t going to engage or be absorbed by most of your employees – smaller chunks of relevant, actionable information are by far preferable. Think about it – would you have clicked on this article if I’d entitled it 5,901 Secrets To Making Staff Training Stick? Even if you had, how far down that list would you have made it?
5. The Facilitator is not the main attraction: Whatever practices or competencies you may want your staff to pick up, or however accomplished or highly-paid the training professional you’ve brought in might be, your staff will know your business better than anyone else you leave in the room with them. It should be the facilitators job to tease out that knowledge and experience, encourage interaction, discussion and debate about workplace issues, and steer the conversation away from dead ends and towards productive information. Your staff will retain better those solutions and ideas that emerge organically from their own experience and discussion than list of dictates from an external expert, no matter how accomplished he or she might be.

 

What Your Customers Want At The Meat Counter.

Fresh meat is big business. According to the FDII, in 2008 the total gross agricultural output of Ireland was valued at €5.7 billion, of which cattle accounted for 26%, pigs for 5% and sheep for 3%. Overall, meat production accounts for a significant percentage of the total agricultural output of Ireland. The meat sector and meat retailing hasn’t been without its scandals, of course, with issues like BSE in beef and the more recent horsemeat scandal in processed foods bringing a spotlight on meat production, processing and retail. Even in the last week, there’s been some potentially troubling reports around the issue of fresh meat retailing: here. It’s our business to figure out what your customers make of all this, so we went ahead and asked them.
48.06% of our 283 respondents advised that they purchased their fresh meat in a butchers, the remaining 52% purchasing their across a wide range of different retailers (Tesco the largest single fresh meat retailer in this survey with 40.28% of our respondents purchasing their meat there – way ahead of the runner up, Supervalu, which accounted for 23.67%). Of the respondents who advised us they purchased their meat from a butchers, quality and freshness, along with trust and tracability, were perhaps unsurprisingly the main reasons given. When we asked our respondents whether they purchased their meat from the fresh meat counter, 69.96% told us that they did. The main reasons given for this were to get meat cut to order (49.47%) and because of the butcher’s knowledge (34.98%). It’s worth noting, however, that almost a quarter of our respondents (24.03%) did tell us that they only go to the fresh meat counter for “special occasions”.
Of the 30.04% of respondents that claimed they didn’t buy meat from a fresh meat counter, but instead bought pre-packaged cuts, 58.82% of them explained that this was simply a matter of convenience. A very significant number, however (56.47%), also mentioned that they found the pricing of pre-packaged meat easier to interpret, and perhaps surprisingly there was a significant number of these respondents (38.82%) who had reasons of quality for choosing pre-packed meat – they felt it was easier for them to inspect the meat before choosing which package to purchase. These responses make it clear that there are actionable ways that retailers could try to drive traffic towards their fresh meat counter – facilitating more clearly priced meat and working with customers to allow them a proper inspection of the meat that they’re buying may go some way towards shepherding customers towards the fresh meat counter.
In terms of what retailers our respondents felt were doing the meat counter right – overwhelmingly they felt that local butchers were the most effective (69.26%), suggesting that major retailers have not quite managed to outrun the stigma associated with the meat scandals of recent times. Of the major retailers, Supervalu and Superquinn were the rated significantly ahead of the rest (18.85% and 16.6% respectively). The next highest rated of the major chains was Tesco, at 7.26% – a significant dropoff. In terms of the pre-packaged market, the breakdown was actually much the same. The single most trusted segment of our survey when it came to where our respondents were buying prepackaged meat was again the local butcher – 46.79%. After them, with an only slightly higher rating for prepackaged meat than they had for fresh, came Supervalu and Superquinn (21.58% and 18.07% respectively). Once more, the next closest of the major chains was Tesco, but again at a significant dropoff (12.76%).
So, it’s clear from our survey that when it comes to buying meat, people approach it with the ghosts of the scandals weighing on their mind – they still predominantly prefer their local butcher to the big chains. Even those chains that seemed to perform best in our survey (Supervalu and Superquinn) come way behind local butchers in terms of preference among the people we surveyed. Really, the only aspects of pre-packaged meat that really seemed to compete with the meat counter was the aspect of convenience – customers can walk in and pick it up with minimal fuss, and the price will be clearly labelled on the packaging – no requirement to discuss measurements with a butcher or do any mental arithmetic. These are the factors on which prepackaged meat manages to successfully compete with the fresh meat counter.