In order to make people to share their thoughts and ideas, some basic things can be done such as suggestion boxes installed, customer comment cards available to pick straight at the till, telephone service introduced, questionnaires put onto the website, easy accessible online surveys and feedback forms both online and on the paper sheets. In TESCO for instance there are so called club cards that not only allow us to collect points but also allows them to monitor how often do we shop at their store, what we buy and how much do we spend every time. So, if suddenly repeat customers are not going to the store anymore, something is obviously wrong, and the management team might even think of sending them personalised letters and asking why they do not visit the store anymore. Another company – O2 – they send their customers messages from time to time or even call them asking about their opinion, experience and other standard questions which is a bit annoying though. If you change you network provider, they will send a letter asking the reason why you have done that. Another interesting example can be TK Max. I’ve been there last week and what I’ve noticed were stickers in the fitting rooms saying that everyone, who has purchased something in their shop and has a receipt, can go to their website, and take part in the lottery by simply filling in the survey. This is how they urge their customers to fill their questionnaires as people do not want to spend their free time on such ‘nonsense’.
On the whole, all those businesses use more or less similar ways of making their customers share their opinions and ideas.
How improvements can be made
Improvements to customer service
The evaluation process should help to find out areas where improvements are needed. Reliability is crucial for customer confidence. They are not going to purchase anything that fails or breaks down after a few days of use. If a product is faulty, some changes must be made to solve the issue and they also have to make sure that customers can easily return the product back to store. If many customers are asking to introduce the same product then it is worth doing that otherwise they will be possibly forced to go to another store if they really need it and it may even turn out that they’ll do the entire shopping there.
Improvements for the organisation
Keeping constant well-trained staff is essential for the company and it prevents wasting money on training the new ones. Staff will be satisfied only if working conditions are satisfying enough, salaries are reasonably high and they are respected and treated decently by the management.
Attracting new customers and keeping the old ones may be pretty problematic task to do unless everything is in the perfect order already of course. Sometimes the old customers tend to be mistreated, forced to wait longer in a queue as an example.
Loyalty cards, rewards in the form of collecting points or vouchers could help to keep existing customers and increase turnover as it is much cheaper rather than attracting the new ones which requires a lot more money pouring into various marketing and promotional campaigns.
At first glance, ordinary and unnoticeable aspect such as the security level in the shop may also affect preferences of consumers. Therefore presence of the security officer is obligatory, however when there are too many of them at once people feel themselves a bit uncomfortable.
How monitoring and evaluating can improve customer service for the customer, the organisation and the employee.
Monitoring and evaluating both help to indicate and work out existing actual problems. Next step is to solve them.
In order to improve the shopping experience for instance products that are not popular among buyers can be easily taken off and replaced by those which are demanded by customers. Shelves can be also rearranged in order to make it easier for customers to navigate and do not spend hours looking for one item. Different signs can be hung to indicate each section or department.
After some improvements are made, retention of existing customers will be more stable and new ones are likely to be attracted as well. Therefore profit will grow and if customers are happy number of complaints will gradually decrease and some of buyers might even send compliment letters occasionally. The more customers will come to the business, the busier staff is going to be; and although on the bright side it makes the working day pass quicker as people are not bored at the workplace thinking about getting home ASAP, management has to analyse this change very carefully as staff can get exhausted too after a long busy working day. That’s why they might need to think about employing new staff in order to diminish the pressure on the old ones. Pleasant working environment is a key to fulfilling of employee’s needs.
Good deliberate organisation of shelves and offices will also make the daily work of staff less problematic and the working routine can be made a bit brighter. So if staff has a bit more spare time they can devote it to other important aspects and therefore they will have probably better product knowledge. If so they will have more confidence in products or service they are selling. On the whole staff should be happy with their work.
In my opinion O2 is doing quite well as they have good staff organisation, decent salaries and they are making all efforts to attract new clients and to keep them. Their working conditions are also much better comparing with the rest of the businesses, especially trading. As a mobile network provider they are to be able to offer something that looks really tempting to stand out against a background. They are trying to follow all rules that relate to overall success and as a result they achieve their aims. Such companies with many satisfied consumers are less likely to go out of the business.
That’s why as a conclusion I would like to emphasise that O2 is certainly the best company in my opinion.
