We had extremely positive experiences of using Maze in our Nordic region and had managed to increase our customer loyalty (ambassador customers) by 10%, so a decision was made to roll the system out through the rest of our stores globally – says Jill Clark, Frm Director of Customer Services at Specsavers.
In terms of the UK market we had different customer insight programmes in place such as mystery shopping (6 visits per annum per store) and also a customer satisfaction index rating where we polled 50 customers for store based feedback once per year.
Whilst these programmes provided customer insight they were extremely labour intensive, costly and didn’t provide sufficient visual and fact based information to help our store colleagues make a real difference.
We need our customer facing colleagues to excel in delivering a high quality customer experience. We know increased levels of customer loyalty result from the thousands of positive interactions happening each day in every one of our stores – but most importantly, we need to know where we are going wrong – says Clark.
A key business issue facing us was increased footfall which resulted in pockets of challenges regarding customer service levels. We had to start measuring the customer journey and experience on a store by store basis. We also recognised the ability to do this on a daily basis was far more important than sporadically throughout the year. To help tackle this issue we decided to use the Maze approach and system on a global basis across the UK and Republic of Ireland and leverage the valuable knowledge gained by our Nordic colleagues.
Maze has enabled us to focus on every aspect of the customer journey and to identify specific areas for training and coaching. We can also contact our frustrated customers to resolve any issues that have arisen. This approach helps us to retain our loyal customers and develop their goodwill for our brand with their family, friends, social media etc.
For example, in the first year of using Maze, UK Specsavers has received over 200,000 individual online customer survey responses. These are fact based and from real customers.
It is very important to Specsavers that we maintain our number 1 position, and customer service excellence plays an important part in this. Maze helps keep service at the top of our agenda and helps us differentiate ourselves against our competitors. – We have been quick and creative to exploit the use of Maze across other areas of the business.
For example Maze has a great survey capability so we use this aspect of Maze to carry out multiple internal surveys covering employee engagement, store director specific feedback and support service (e.g. IT) feedback from our internal community. Specsavers have achieved an enviable position of being able to dynamically receive customer data at store level on a daily basis and connect this to strategic imperatives.
Through Maze we’ve been able to glean the key actions required and develop specific training materials to target key strategic themes such as massively reduce waiting times. This is a huge generator for keeping customers engaged during their visit that day in addition to retaining their loyalty for their future needs.
Specsavers recieved over 1.6 million feedback responses globaly during the last year.
In summary, Maze allows us to convert the extensive, fact based customer feedback into meaningful actions at store level. This provides a process of continuous improvement and learning for our store colleagues.
We focus a lot of our efforts on the neutral responses we receive from our continuous surveys. It’s important to understand precisely why the customer had a neutral response in order for us to rectify the matter.
On many occasions we’ve been able to provide immediate remedies and convert this customer to an ambassador. Clearly this is a huge business benefit. Maze allows us to motivate our teams on a daily basis through the morning huddles, give praise, define focus areas, identify challenges and put them right immediately.
We have great TV advertising campaigns which generate potential customer to visit our stores – it’s absolutely imperative that we must be able to execute efficiently and follow through on our customer service promise – says Clark.
The most impactful part of your success and revenue as a retailer is your company culture. This is what all other positive effects come from. Yet, this is something many companies don’t talk about very often. Let’s look at why this should be a top priority, and how you can build a winning culture.
On the 14th of February, we facilitated an exclusive networking event where some of our most growth-minded Maze customers from the Nordics got together for an inspiring Meetup! Here are some of their biggest takeaways from the event.
Let’s look at some examples where investing in customer experience leads to increased conversions and hit rate, which in turn leads to profit for your stores.
