Analysis: Mobile as a customer feedback channel

Understanding how customers view your product, service and brand is invaluable in gaining the insights required to isolate issues and increase customer value. Ecrebo’s technology reinvents antiquated in-store feedback systems to help retailers open a real-time feedback channel with their customers.

Capturing customer feedback is easy when you have a single location, but as bricks-and-mortar retail businesses gain scale, the ability to monitor customer experience across a growing estate becomes much more difficult. For feedback to deliver actionable insight, retailers need to know as much about the customer service encounter as possible – where the customer visited, when, what they purchased, who served them, etc. – and this creates an issue. The process a customer is required to go through in order to give meaningful feedback is so convoluted that it deters customers from doing so.

A quick look at the online feedback forms of some of the UK’s top retailers reveals a typical customer is expected to cycle through an average of 12 pages of questions to complete the process. Much of this process is focused on ascertaining the context of the customer feedback, i.e. where the customer shopped, what they purchased, service staff. Personal details are almost always requested at some point, further elongating the process and increasing the likelihood of the customer abandoning the session.

Ensuring customer feedback initiatives deliver maximum value to your organisation relies on three key elements: firstly, ensure the feedback process is as quick and simple as possible for your customers – eliminate all unnecessary effort. Secondly, close the loop on feedback by implementing systems to react to customer feedback instantly and automatically. Finally, process feedback data in a way that delivers instant insight, identifying trends/problems and isolating root-cause as soon as possible. Ecrebo technology reinvents the feedback process, leveraging customer mobile devices to open a channel for personal customer feedback.

Using the same technology that drives Ecrebo’s printed engagement at till and digital receipts, retailers can set triggers to deliver feedback requests based on specific customer behaviour. For example, if a customer has purchased a new product or visited a new store, a request for feedback on that product or store can be appended to the customer’s transaction receipt. This feedback request takes the form of a personal message and a QR code.

Scanning this QR code takes the customer to a simple feedback form, which can be browser-based, or integrated into retailer mobile applications. The simplicity of this feedback form is made possible because each QR code is unique and references a specific transaction. This means that scanning a receipt-based QR code not only takes the customer to a simple feedback form, but also associates any feedback with that specific transaction event.

What does this mean in terms of capturing customer feedback? Given exhaustive data on any transaction event is already known – store location, products purchased, time and date, serving cashier, etc. – feedback requests can be delivered with very few well-considered questions. No longer is a customer required to give the context surrounding their experience, only how they found it. This means a very quick and simple process at the customer level delivers highly detailed feedback for the organisation.

Ecrebo’s Attune platform not only allows retailers to personalise feedback requests based on customer behaviour. It also automates real-time response to customer feedback in order to thank or quickly rescue at-risk customers. For example, should a customer submit very poor feedback, an instant response can be configured to ensure both an apology and an incentive to visit again to make-up for the poor experience is sent. Isolating, communicating with and ultimately rescuing these at-risk customers helps mitigate poor customer experience and relies on the real-time nature of mobile as a feedback channel.

Real-time analysis of feedback data means retailers can quickly isolate problems and areas for focus. Branch, and even staff-level data, means training issues can be located and addressed without any unnecessary delay. As well as isolating problem areas, Ecrebo’s personalised feedback channel can also be used to find those customers who will gladly become brand advocates. Using customer mobile devices as a feedback channel means leveraging these customers to advocate your brand via social channels becomes simple.

Ecrebo has processed over two billion transactions and powered delivery of over 300 million personalised customer engagements. Ecrebo’s solution powers customer engagement for some of the UK’s largest retailers.

Contact Ecrebo to find out how we can help.