TruRating CEO calls for ‘Open CX’ in the retail sector
Georgina Nelson wants retailers everywhere to start prying open the black box of customer feedback they’re hiding behind.
The CEO of TruRating has a background in psychology, but you don’t need one to know that much of the data brands use to shape their customer experience (CX) strategies doesn’t truly represent how the majority of consumers feel.
Surveys may only capture a fraction of the total customer base, for example, and primarily the voices of those with an axe to grind. Worse, the data gets walled off in silos and not shared with others who should be providing input on CX programs.
This has led Nelson – whose Atlanta-based firm provides a mass point-of-payment feedback system where customers can seamlessly share their opinions – to begin talking about the concept of ‘Open CX.’ It’s not so much a TruRating product but a philosophy based on gathering feedback with holistic transparency.
Last month, TruRating launched a campaign on the Open CX theme that included a video and a manifesto that discusses it in detail:
“The current approach to customer feedback is fundamentally broken,” the manifesto begins. “You’re only hearing from your angriest, loudest customers. They’re making you chase after issues you can’t quantify. And after all that – these customers can still go online and trash your business.”
Though the Open CX materials all point to TruRating as a solution, Nelson said she hopes the broader community of vendors and CX teams will embrace its principles. These include directly connecting feedback to what someone bought, how much they spent and enabling anyone in an organization to identify financial opportunities.
“It was the crystallization of a lot of conversations with our customers about the journey they’ve been on,” Nelson told 360 Magazine. “CX has been something which was quite closed. There wasn’t great buy-in across the organization, and people felt pretty disenfranchised. They’d spent huge amounts on these programs. It had taken years to implement them and then the results weren’t delivering on what was promised.”
Part of the problem is also in the way feedback has been collected, Nelson added. For example, we’ve all gotten the post-purchase e-mail survey where brands say “We value your feedback,” only to ask a litany of questions.
Nelson believes this has caused feedback fatigue and skews data around those who are angry enough to respond. She talked about meeting with a chief customer officer of a pharmacy chain who was congratulating the team about gathering millions of pieces of feedback.
“When you actually do the math and work out what that means in terms of their actual customer response rate, it was less than one per cent,” she said, adding that timeliness is also a critical factor to consider. “My customer experience of a retailer is only as good as the last time I went into their store.”
TruRating believes it has achieved Open CX by asking only a single question, which consumers answer directly on a POS terminal as they make a retail purchase. This doesn’t simply have to be something like, “Are you satisfied with your experience?” but smarter questions, such as whether a consumer had intentioned to make that particular purchase that day.
When this works well, Nelson said retailers not only get a high-level look at customer satisfaction but gain greater confidence in making key strategic decisions. Getting thousands of data points within a single week, for instance, could help a retailer know whether they should move forward with a new store layout or introduce a new range of merchandise.
“If you need to have a bit of a change management within the company, you can run a pilot in a handful of stores, and prove the impact before you expand it across the entire company,” Nelson said.
Others go whole-hog. Cracker Barrel, for instance, recently rolled out TruRating to thousands of stores. Nelson said the company is now getting feedback from three quarters of its customer base. This can happen within weeks because brands don’t have to do any development. They simply integrate TruRating with their payment provider, she explained.
If Open CX takes off as Nelson hopes, it might mean rethinking or re-prioritizing the metrics brands use to evaluate their progress. She advised thinking beyond Net Promoter Scores and CSAT, and instead looking at what people are spending and how often they return.
“These are things that could be influenced by the availability of staff on the floor, whether people were greeted when they came in or whether they could find what they were looking for,” she said. “These are data points they can measure every minute of the day. And that’s when they see their customer experience improve.”
