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i-Loyalty: Wireless Customer Satisfaction
Mobile phones now allow retailers to gather the opinions of their customers in near real-time, on a continuous basis. JMI has recently launched a dedicated product called "i-loyaltyE Here we take a look at some of the lessons from Japan and the power of using wireless technology for measuring retail customer satisfaction.
I can't get no ... satisfaction. But I try...
Listening to customers and taking on board their views is more important today for retailers than ever before. This is especially so as shopper expectations continue to rise and the amount of choice available to them (competition for a given retailer!) also becomes more intense.
The traditional approach used by market researchers to measure retail customer satisfaction is pen & paper. And while it may be quite simple to stack some questionnaires into a corner of a store together with a box where customers can post their responses, this approach does have several weaknesses.
First among these is the innate inconvenience Eboth to the customer and to the client. The customer must either complete the questionnaire while in the store OR mail it back later. In most cases, this results in relatively low levels of completion.
For the client (or agency) the questionnaires must then be gathered from various locations, coded and tabulated before reporting, a process that consumes both time and resource.
Often the customer who is sufficiently motivated to share their opinions is the one who feels the need to vent after some negative experience Eobviously giving a skew to the overall results. While using an interviewer to conduct can create bias in the opposite sense.
Using mobile phones as the survey platform avoids some of these problems, while bringing a few unique additional benefits in its own right...
Mobile CS: How does it work?
i-Loyalty wireless customer satisfaction is conducted in simple 3-step process shown in fig 1.0 below:
Recruitment: This is done using "QREbar codes printed on to flyers that are displayed in the stores.
The flyers offer customers an incentive to participate. Usually a layered approach is used for these incentives e.g. customers are offered both a guaranteed incentive of relatively low value (such as a limited edition wall paper or ring tone for their phone) and the chance to enter into a draw to possibly win a prize of high value in a draw. This ensures coverage of customers of both mindsets.
Customers take the flyers (often printed to credit card size) with them and are then free to complete the survey at a time and place of their choosing. They enter the survey by reading the bar code, using the camera on their cell phone; the vast majority of mobile phones in Japan are equipped with cameras that can function as bar code readers.
Reading the barcode transfers the data for the survey link on to the mobile phone.
Interview: The interview itself functions much like a mini-version of a regular online survey.
Given the limitation of the screen size, the length of the questionnaire is limited to 10-15 questions maximum, of which only one or two should be open-ended answers, requiring the typing of text strings. However pull-down menus, radio buttons and other regular types of question can be included.
One important aspect of the survey software is that it needs to support the multitude of platforms available in the market. In Japan there are 3 major cell-phone providers and with up to 200 different handsets available. The survey software therefore needs to recognize the specificities of a given phone and ensure that the questionnaire layout takes these into account.
Reporting: With strong logical checking built into the questionnaire coding, the results of the survey can be reported directly to the client, in real time, using OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) software. This allows the client to tabulate and graph the data according to their requirements, with minimal delay.
The benefits
i-Loyalty offers many advantages over more traditional approaches
Firstly it has been found that in situations where pen and paper was previously used, allowing comparisons to be made, i-Loyalty generates more data (larger sample sizes) for the retailers, with national coverage easily achieved. Also completion rates are high; over 80% of customers who start the survey on their mobile actually finish it.
In part, this is a reflection of the convenience of using the mobile phone, but also it is important that the incentive formula works well. This way the opinions collected are more representative of the general population of shoppers (not just those who are motivated to complain!). Cutting out interviewers and the retailers from the process, also eliminates other potential sources of bias from the data.
The fact the surveys are conducted online also allows for complex skip patterns to be used. In this way questionnaire logic can be used to help retailers to drill down, generating highly focused results at the specific store level and product level.
Finally the reporting of the results can be provided in real-time using OLAP software. This allows managers at the headquarters to track satisfaction at the local level, quickly identifying problems or pinpointing success factors that can be transferred from one outlet to another.
Japan's mobile phone revolution is a giving a voice to consumers, while for retailers and manufacturers it's providing the means by which these large companies can now keep their fingers on the pulse of their core target. A 21st century win-win that provides satisfaction all round!
JMI's work on location based mobile research will be presented to the ESOMAR congress in London on Tuesday 19 September.
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