It’s been a crazy few months of ups and downs in the UK. One minute we’re happy (sunshine, winning the cricket), the next minute we’re down in the dumps (riots, lack of Olympic tickets). We certainly seem to be in a lengthy spell of inconsistency, where the only constant appears to be that nobody can predict what’s going to happen next.
With that in mind, I find it surprising that many retailers are happy to plan long-term strategy with a number of unknowns around their customers. How can a business create plans when their customers are still—to a lesser or greater extent—unpredictable? Yet many retailers are resistant to turn to customer satisfaction surveys to eliminate some unpredictability.
Several years ago, this attitude was understandable. Customer satisfaction surveys were slow, expensive, and often quite painful to execute. By the time the results came out, the customer had moved on. However, in 2011, with the internet allowing customer feedback to be available within minutes, and prices costing less per month than a mystery shop, it baffles me why some senior directors are sticking with the vision of “Four mystery visits per year tells me all I need to know about my customers.” Why wouldn’t you want to know what your customers think and take away some of that ongoing unpredictability?
Knowing the health of your brand is one way to reduce unpredictability. In this edition of SMG Insights, we talk about the qualitative work we’re doing with clients to help them understand their place in the market.
It is continually a delight to see forward-thinking retailers join SMG to start looking at what drives customer loyalty within their brands and using consumer insight to increase business performance. It therefore gives me great pleasure to welcome Iceland Foods Ltd to the SMG UK family, and we very much look forward to working with them on a new customer insight programme.
As always, please let me know if you would like to chat or meet up to discuss anything in this newsletter. Our doors, phones, and inboxes are always open.