Retailers losing £102 billion a year due to poor CX

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Comment from Richard Davey, Head of Customer Success, Upland Rant & Rave.

Retailers have for a long time spoken about the value of customer feedback, but still too few are closing the loop with customers quickly enough when acting on negative comments. New researchshows that retailers are losing £102 billion each year due to poor customer experience. Within that, 66 percent of customers have stated they have left a store due to long queues in the past six months. Customer pain-points like these are proving costly for retailers, but they’re easy to resolve if brands are willing to implement and install real-time feedback measurement tools such as ‘listening posts’.

These can have a huge impact in changing and improving a store’s customer experience. Listening posts can take many forms - from standalone devices to printed posters on walls - making it easy for customers to lodge their feedback via an SMS, URL or simple QR code scan. Once feedback is left by the customer, it can be presented to staff in the company dashboard. Certain words could even be set up to trigger alerts - for example, ‘queue’. So, if a customer complained about the length of a queue, an alert would be flagged enabling a member of staff to be added to the tills reactively to instantly shorten customer wait times at the checkout.

If trends in the dashboard show the word ‘queue’ continually being spoken about negatively, more in-depth analysis is required. This insight can then be used to drive evidence-based change through more strategic initiatives led by individuals higher up in the business - like the introduction of self-checkout systems or mobile cashiers. By deploying real-time, customer experience technology in-store, retailers can ensure they are listening to the voice of the customer to address those costly problems as quickly as possible.’