How Do Your Customers Feel About It?

Mobile payments (paying for goods and services using your mobile phone) is a quickly-growing trend across the world (most quickly outside of the West, however), with many businesses rushing to adopt the new method of accepting payments. There are several good reasons for that; it’s a very effective and versatile way of accepting payments for goods and services. It’s often (depending on the provider) very easy to set up, and especially handy for businesses who do a lot of business at remote locations – if you’re a food retailer, for example, that relies on a lot of trade fairs or farmers markets, etc, it’s a simple, effective way to set up a payment system without the hassle of major infrastructural requirements or credit card machines, etc. It’s also cheaper (again, depending on the provider) than accepting credit card payments, the service charge levied by the service providers often being less than those charged by traditional credit card companies.

There’s another reason why retailers love mobile phone payment, too – for information gathering and collection on your customer base it’s better than almost any other method of payment – loyalty programmes and targeted promotions live or die by the quality of the information provided. All of these advantages have something in common, however – they’re all vendor advantages. You might say that the cost saving would eventually be passed on to the customer, and while that’s true, it’s tenuous – there are multiple steps between the service and the advantage to the customer. The same is true of any targeted promotions. There’s an argument that it’s more convenient for customers, but do your customers really find it all that inconvenient to carry a credit card? So inconvenient that they’ll change their consumer behaviours? We wondered about that, so we asked them.

Our first survey question was our most direct. We asked simply whether customers would have any issues using their mobile phone for contactless payment in a shop. The answer was very significantly no. 64.08% of respondents said they’d have no issues. That obviously does mean that 35.92% of respondents did have issues with it, and that’s a significant minority, but it still is a minority. Apparently in this mobile world people are largely comfortable using technology (especially their mobile phone) for all kinds of procedures. You might think there’d be a generation gap in that comfort, and there is, but it’s only a slight one. Consumers 35-44 were actually the ones most comfortable with the concept of mobile phone payment (77.78% of respondents reporting no issues with using mobile phones for payment), but even in the 75+ category 50% of respondents reported they’d have no issues (which interestingly is the exact same proportion of 18-24 year olds). On the whole then, it seems that whether or not they feel there’d be significant advantages to payment by mobile phone, people are certainly open to the idea.

In terms of those advantages, 33.98% felt that using their phone for payment would be attractive due to the ease of use – their phones are always there, they know them and already use them for mobile banking, etc . People like their phones, and feel essentially replacing a credit card with their phone could be a good idea. 18.45% felt it would be quicker, with 1.94% felt it would be more useful for budgeting reasons, and 33.98% that it would cut down on the need to carry cash. A single respondent also felt that the fact that phones are password protected meant it was inherently more secure than a credit card, on which all the information required to conduct a transaction is printed right there on the plastic. That respondent, however, proved to be in something of a minority.

Overwhelmingly, the reservation displayed by our respondents was in relation to data security. Overall, 33.01% of respondents felt that if the phone was lost, they would be leaving themselves exposed to criminal activity. Even without considering losing the phone, 52.43% of respondents cited general security concerns as a perceived disadvantage of mobile phone payment. That means between the specific security concern of losing the phone and more general security concerns, 85.44% of respondents felt the security issue was the major factor in adopting this form of payment. In the survey we suggested other options – consumers’ comfort using the technology, (no one selected this, people love their phones) and vendor acceptance – how many businesses are set up to take payment this way, compared to old-fashioned credit or debit cards (only 8.74% of people considered this the major objection). Overwhelmingly, the reservation on adopting mobile phone payment was data security fears.

For retailers, who for reasons of cost or convenience are attempting to adopt mobile payment systems, the survey reveals both good and bad elements. Very few people seem to have an in-principle problem with using their phone for mobile payments. Fundamentally, the great spectre here is data security. To encourage people to adopt this form of payment they’ll have to be convinced of its security and safety. They seem quite ready to believe in the convenience and speed of the system – convince them it’s secure and it really will be able to viably compete with the other methods out there.

How The Irish Purchase Alcohol Today.

The purchase and sale of alcohol has been a subject of much debate in Ireland for a long time. Changes to licensing hours, staggering closing times – over the years there’s been significant debate about multiple aspects of how we regulate our drinking, to say nothing of the annual discussion every budget day on what’s happened to the price of a pint. The Irish relationship with alcohol isn’t without controversy or something that the entire populace wholeheartedly embrace, but once upon a time it did, at least, seem unshakable. The Irish Pub was one of our most important tourist attractions, with even visiting foreign dignitaries making the obligatory stop-off for a photo shoot in some small hostelry or other. Against that background there’s a startling statistic, however – that over the past decade, 2,000 Irish pubs have closed (found here). The media will tell you that people’s drinking habits have changed – that people are more likely to stay home later with less expensive off-licence booze before heading out for a brief visit to a pub late in the evening (or possibly even bi-passing the pub completely for a more lively nightclub). It’s our business to know what people are buying, and how they’re buying it, so we asked some people exactly what they’re experience of purchasing alcohol is.

We surveyed people across a wide age range, asking where they most regularly purchase alcohol. Overall, by far the most popular type of vendor was the supermarket, with 75.65% of all respondents claiming that that was where they most commonly purchased alcohol. Among our respondents, the next most popular establishment for purchasing alcohol was the off licence, but it was a distant, distant second, representing only 13.04% of alcohol purchases. This stayed remarkably consistent right across the age ranges, also. Supermarkets were at their most popular among the age range 25-34 (92.86% of purchases made there), but it remained the most popular right throughout the survey until we reached the over 75 age group, where they were only 50% of respondents first choice vendor – obviously 50% still accounts for a huge proportion of sales.

When we asked about the factors affecting their purchasing of alcohol, again the responses were remarkably consistent right throughout the age ranges. The first may be the most obvious – cost. Overall 60% exactly of our respondents felt cost was the most important factor in the purchasing of alcohol. This tallies quite well with the previous finding – obviously the buying power of supermarkets make them one of the cheapest places from which to purchase alcohol. Again, there was remarkable consistency throughout our age ranges. Cost was overwhelmingly the single most important factor for all age groups (64.29% of 25-34s felt it the most important factor, 72.73% of 35-44s) with the single exception, once again, of the over 75s, where it tied with branding as joint most important. By the time you reach 75, you know what brands you like, apparently.

A possible response worth considering (especially related to the issue of cost) is that 6.96% of our respondents mentioned that they bought their alcohol in Northern Ireland or abroad. This may be an extreme example of cost-saving, but it does represent a small but significant number of people willing to travel, and finding it worth the cost. This would obviously be most significant for traders in border regions, but it also marks the rise in the phenomenon of people hopping on a ferry to France with an empty car or small van, loading it up with booze and being sorted for a year. Ultimately, everything underlines the pre-eminence of cost in the decision-making process.

For alcohol retailers, the absolute concreteness of these responses may make for grim reading – by far and away the most important factor for people in purchasing alcohol is the price, what might have seemed inconceivable a generation ago – that Irish people would abandon the pub for cheaper alcohol elsewhere – seems to have come to pass. The only real light at the end of this tunnel is that overall the second most important factor in choosing a place to buy alcohol is the variety. At 22.61% of respondents choosing it, it’s a distant second to the 60% who chose cost, but it’s a significant number just the same. It seems the best way for off-licences (and pubs, in fact) to compete with the big supermarkets in the sale of alcohol is to offer their customers options that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. That means craft beers and micro-breweries, unusual imports etc. It’s not a way of by-passing the fundamental importance of cost in this process, but it’s certainly a way to meet what is an important need of a very significant number of potential customers.

What Best Practice Mystery Shopping Looks Like.

Every week we stick up another blog on this site, and we try always to make them relevant and useful to business. We have 20 years’ experience in mystery shopping and consumer consultancy, so we have the information to base it on. However, we’ve only occasionally gone into the actual process of mystery shopping – how it works and how it can benefit your business. This week I want to dispel any impression I’ve given that mystery shopping is a hit-and-miss activity, a series of idle observations by casual observers who don’t know the workings of your business. Thinking of the procedure like that, you’d be forgiven for imagining that the process may be of limited use, or at least that its usefulness may be unpredictable and patchy. This isn’t the case, and while you may be forgiven for thinking we would say that, here’s a little bit on our procedures, on how a mystery shop really works, and how we make sure it’s relevant and useful to your business.

Step 1: What Do You Want To Learn?

This is our first step, every time. You need to know exactly what you want to learn. Obviously, mystery shopping is always about gaining insights into the customer experience, but within that there’s distinctions you need to make. Do you want to know why one area of your business is working while another isn’t? Why customer footfall has gone down (or even up, you want to be able to sustain it!), or why sales fluctuate in a given way. Think about the questions you really want to ask. We can always send in shoppers and give you feedback, but focused feedback is better than general, especially when it comes to practical actions later in the procedure.

Step 2: Formulate The Questions.

Now that you know what you want to know (so to speak), you need to decide how best to get that information. We’ve been doing this for a long time, we can guide you on how best to do that, but a necessary first step is always to speak to staff (and any information you’ve already picked up from customers in casual research). You need to decide definable metrics that can be measured and recorded. Formulate an evaluation form that records the measurable metrics which addresses the questions you decided on, which the mystery shoppers can address.

Step 3: Perform The Mystery Shop.

Select an experienced, articulate and observant mystery shopper. Inform them of the questions being asked by the business in question, walk them through the evaluation form so they understand the context and reasoning behind each of the questions, then send them into the business armed with this understanding, ready to make useful, relevant observations.

Step 4: Report The Findings.

This step might seem to almost go without saying, but I want to make sure we cover it. For many mystery shopping companies, you’ll find that reporting is kept quite rigid – their mystery shoppers are required to tick boxes and give simple, one or two word answers that directly address the questions in the evaluation form. That’s fine, you might think, and indeed we certainly require that all our mystery shoppers are to-the-point and supply the required information. However, we are slightly different to other mystery shopping companies in that we do allow a certain amount of subjective observation on the part of our shoppers. We have time and again seen the benefit of allowing a mystery shopper to make an unexpected observation that can inspire insight into the customer experience or a previously not considered method of addressing customer needs.

Step 5: Analyse The Report.

Once the report is filed, the time comes to mine it for all the useful information it contains. You need to take the feedback and identify gaps in the service delivery and the origins of those gaps. It’s also at this stage a crucial to decide the actions to take that will effectively address them. Mystery shopping isn’t about punishing anyone or catching them out, it’s about reinforcing best practice and identifying issues in your service delivery that would otherwise go unrecognised. The actions should be positive and designed to answer the specific issues raised.

Step 6: Implement The Actions!

The final step in the process, but maybe the most crucial. This is the step without which all the previous steps amount to nothing. You need to find creative and effective ways of ensuring the insights you’ve gained from the process up to this point are auctioned in the daily running of your business. We’ve been through the procedure before, of course, and we can help you with that. It might mean developing a reward and incentive scheme related to employee performance. It might mean providing coaching or training to employees to effectively develop their technical or behavioural skills. It’s not all about staff, either. If gaps exist in your procedures or systems, they have to be overhauled so customers aren’t bearing the brunt of poor design. There’s a lot of potential areas where mystery shopping can expose deficiencies or suggest improvements.

Hopefully having run through the actual procedure of mystery shopping we can show just how useful, practical and focused the activity can be.

What’s So Great About Supermarket Loyalty Cards?

I recently read a very interesting article on supermarket loyalty cards (here’s the article). It’s a very interesting read, so I recommend you give it a glance over at least, but here’s the salient point: supermarket loyalty cards don’t work for supermarkets, despite the fact that supermarkets seem determined to run and even expand them. Some of the main points covered were fairly straightforward and common sense – most people don’t own just one loyalty card, preferring instead to carry a walletful of options, making loyalty card shoppers the most disloyal of customers when the numbers are finally crunched (according to the above article, the average loyalty card shopper shops in 3.6 outlets for consumables, compared to 2.9 for non-loyalty card holders). The article also makes the point that compared to special offer leaflets and traditional deal promotion of that kind, loyalty card schemes are expensive to run (administration, IT, analytics, and most of the data they collect is collectable from transaction records anyway), the deals they offer are exclusive – you have to have a loyalty card to avail of them, whereas traditional methods allow you to attract a broader range of potential new customers – and finally, despite the investment in loyalty card deals, major retailers like Tesco have still found their business being eroded by discount retailers like Aldi. All in all, the article paints quite a bleak picture of the overall effectiveness of loyalty card schemes.

Having read the article, we decided to do some of our own research, to try and understand better from the customer’s point of view exactly what part loyalty card schemes play in influencing customer decisions and behaviour. Here’s what we discovered. The first question we asked was the most obvious and the most straightforward: Does having a loyalty card influence where you shop? The response was overwhelmingly positive: for 72.4% of our respondents, the answer was a definite yes. This means that almost 3/4s of the people we surveyed did decide where to conduct their supermarket shopping on the basis of membership in a loyalty card scheme. We also asked our respondents if membership of a loyalty card scheme (the availability of bonus points, specific loyalty card promotions, etc) influenced their specific purchasing decisions within the store, and once again the answer was (perhaps surprisingly) that it did – 68.9% said that it had. This would seem to put a lie to the findings of the initial article, which found that loyalty card schemes had such little effect on customer loyalty.

However, when we asked what factors affect a customer’s decision to enter a loyalty card scheme, by far and away the most important factor people cited was value for money (79.1%). No other factor came close, really, with brand loyalty accounting for just 6.9% and data security concerns just 3.4%. One shopper mentioned the proximity of the supermarket to their home, but the majority of those who wrote in a specific “other” factor mentioned things like “It’s just a little bit back. I wish Lidl did it!”, “What return I get from shopping there” and simply “rewards”. We can also say that when we asked people what store ran the best loyalty card programme – Tesco came out on top (41.3%), with the nearest runner up being Boots (24.1%) – only one of our respondents seemed unable to compare and contrast. That respondent said “As I have no experience of the others, it is not possible to give the “best””; all other respondents were able to compare and contrast quite happily, suggesting that the idea of “loyalty” doesn’t feature strongly in shoppers’ thinking about such programmes. Rather, they tend to shop around, factoring the loyalty bonuses and such like into their calculations of supermarket value. Regardless of how customers may initially say they feel about loyalty card programmes, it seems their behaviours tell a slightly different story, and a story much more in keeping with the findings in the original article.
There was one other contribution of note to survey. One of the respondents, when asked about the best loyalty card schemes out there, shared this anecdote:
“Years ago I had a Dunnes loyalty card, I used it when I shopped. After shopping in there and using the so called loyalty card every time I shopped they sent me a voucher for €1.00 ! I was so annoyed I said I would never shop in Dunnes again. Which I havent and I would never bother with a loyalty card again. It had a negative impact on me!”
This is something for stores to consider when setting up their loyalty card schemes – these schemes should be ways to extend extra value to your customers, but they can end up turning around and having an opposite effect. Ultimately, any store currently running a loyalty card programme should certainly step back and consider the costs of such programmes, and whether the benefits might not be achievable some other (less costly) way.

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.