Retail Excellence Ireland’s SIRA Launch

Lynn and nikki

Customer Perceptions & Optimum Results were delighted to attend the Retail Excellence Ireland’s SIRA Launch in Fallon & Byrne on the evening of Wednesday, 8th of June. SIRA (Sustainable Irish Retail Action) is an excellent initiative designed to create a practical sustainability guide for the retail community to help:

1. Raise standards around ‘Sustainability Understanding and Practice’ within the Irish retail industry.

2. Empower and enable SMEs to ‘build more sustainable solutions’ into their business models by providing them with access to education, tools and support.

3. Develop a community of retailers, whose ambition is to authentically support each other on this sustainability journey within the industry, through best practice sharing.

We were delighted to get a first preview at of the SIRA guide, which is bursting with invaluable information to implement positive sustainability changes in the workplace.

This informative and fun evening featured Mark Mellett, Vice Admiral (Rtd) Former Chief of Defense as a key note speaker, sharing his expertise in the area.. This was followed by an interesting and engaging panel discussion on sustainability in retail and finally, a SIRA presentation to launch the SIRA Guide. With beautiful food and wine provided by Fallon and Byrne throughout the course of the evening, it certainly was a wonderful event, and one of the first that we have had the pleasure of attending in over 2 years!

The Different Types of Mystery Shopping Explained

mysteryshopping

The use of a mystery shopping program in your business is a fantastic way to evaluate how your company operates, from customer service to employee performance. Also known as secret shopping, mystery shopping is a market research tool used to identify problem areas in your business and improve customer loyalty. 

A professional shopper (usually an independent contractor from a mystery shopping agency) will pretend to be an average customer and evaluate the quality of service they receive. The entire process is done anonymously by trained professionals, so no one will know who the mystery shopper is. Therefore, businesses will be provided with professional, unbiased feedback on whether their strategies are working and any problem areas so they can be rectified. 

In-Person Mystery Shops

In-person mystery shopping is the most common type of mystery shopping service used by businesses. As a part of this service, a mystery shopper will anonymously visit a business pretending to be a regular customer and evaluate the business performance and customer journey following a predetermined set of guidelines. 

With in-person mystery shopping, the goal is to conduct the evaluation without raising suspicion from the staff in order to obtain the most accurate information possible. If the staff aren’t aware that someone is evaluating them, they are more likely to act how they would on a daily basis. The secret shopper will have an all-around experience of the customer journey in your store. The visit can vary in length depending on the type of indicators, mystery shopping purpose, or the type of evaluated sphere. 

In-person mystery shopping is most commonly used by retail stores, the hospitality industry, restaurants, and financial institutions. 

Phone Call Mystery Shops

Next on the list is Phone Call Mystery Shopping. Just as audits of performance and customer experience should be conducted in-store, monitoring the telephonic performance of your employees is just as important. Phone Call Mystery Shopping is especially useful for companies that utilise call centres or where customers can receive service telephonically. 

The mystery shopper will call your company to assess the level of service they receive. During the call, the secret shopper will determine the following points (among others) to determine the performance of your business telephonically: 

  • Is it easy or difficult to contact your business?
  • How long did it take for the phone to be answered?
  • The employee’s greeting.
  • The employee’s competence and product knowledge.
  • The employee’s telephone manner and professionalism.
  • The employee’s willingness to help.
  • Whether the customer’s problem was solved on the call or not. 

Typical telephone mystery shops include everything from completing remote transactions to simply asking for additional information. Phone-based mystery shopping is most commonly used by businesses in the following industries: Hospitality, travel, call centres, communication, consulting, insurance, sales, financial services, communication, and healthcare. 

Website Mystery Shops

A strong online presence is crucial to the success of your business in the digital age. Most people carry their phones everywhere, search for businesses nearby, and look at online reviews that can either make or break your business image. In addition, the evolution of e-commerce and e-business has made mystery shopping just as important for online retailers as it is for on-site establishments. 

Website Mystery Shops, also known as virtual mystery shops or internet mystery shopping, see the secret shopper engage with your business online. The secret shopper will assess how responsive your business is online, whether your website is easy to navigate, your employee’s competencies and product knowledge, and how your employees interact with customers on social media and through the website. 

This type of mystery shopping is most commonly used by businesses in the following sectors: e-commerce, travel, insurance, automotive, real estate, and telecommunications. 

Hybrid Mystery Shops

Also referred to as multiple touchpoints or mixed-type mystery shopping, the hybrid service is typically used by larger businesses that need several mystery shopping evaluations. Using in-person, telephonic, and online mystery shoppers ensures you have accurate information and actionable insights into all aspects of your business. 

Hybrid mystery shopping is a fantastic way to assess the entire customer journey across all spheres of your business to better understand the customer’s overall experience from start to finish. 

The type of mystery shopping that best suits your business is dependent on your industry and business model, but if you need help choosing a mystery shopping service that offers the most benefit for your specific needs, contact Customer Perceptions today.

Coffee Drinking in Coffee Shops

Coffee Shop, Coffee brands, customer perc blog post

Why Your Customers Do It, And What They Want More Of.

The Background

Coffee in Ireland is a drink growing in popularity year on year.

The Irish Coffee Council is the voice for the coffee industry in Ireland in matters of growth, manufacture, distribution and consumption of coffee, and while even they accept that “we still drink far less coffee than our European neighbours – and remain at heart a “tea drinking nation”” (here), it is unquestionably true that coffee has been (and continues to be) a consumer good growing more and more in popularity all the time – value sales of coffee grew by 12% in 2014 according to Euromonitor International, with fresh coffee sales accounting for that growth (instant coffee sales are, in fact, consistently declining).

Here at Customer Perceptions, it’s our business to take note of trends in retail and hospitality, so we asked people about their experience and attitudes to coffee shops. This is how they responded, and some conclusions we can draw from those responses.

The Numbers

The first question we asked was very simple – how often do you visit a coffee shop? The largest single group of respondents (56.25%) visited once a week. After that the next largest segments were “a few times a week” (12.5%) or “once every two weeks” (again, 12.5%). Perhaps surprisingly, when we asked our survey respondents whether they preferred sit-in or take-away, fully half of our respondents suggested they preferred to sit in, with only 12.5% preferring take-away coffee (although 37.5% admitted to having no preference either way, which suggests that at some points they are sitting in to drink their coffee). When asked if they prefer large chain coffee shops or small independent establishments, the overwhelming response (50%) responded that they preferred small independent coffee shops. Only 12.5% admitted to preferring large chains.

In a very direct way, it’s not just about the coffee for people. The overwhelmingly vast majority of our respondents do not simply purchase coffee alone – only 12.5% bought nothing else, with 75% of people buying a pastry, cake or bun, or 31.25% (with some overlap, obviously) buying a sandwich. In terms of an average spend, only 31.25% of respondents spent less than €5, with the remainder spending between €5 to €10 per visit. In terms of what people find important when they visit a coffee shop, cleanliness came out on top, with 81.25% of respondents rating it very important, the next closest factor in their choice of coffee shop being staff friendliness (50% rating it very important). Price, perhaps surprisingly, was rated very important by only 37.5%, but 62.5% did rate it quite important.

Another possibly surprising result is that child-friendliness was rated not important by 62.5% of respondents, with only 12.5% rating it very important (below even free wifi, which 18.75% felt was very important). Quality of the coffee itself is also key, given that 87.5% of respondents considered either a very important or quite important factor. So, what conclusions can we draw from these figures?

The Conclusions

Given the background of a the coffee market in Ireland (sales of coffee increasing overall while sales of instant coffee decline) it’s perhaps unsurprising that the quality of coffee has become so important a factor – people seem to be becoming coffee connoisseurs, or at least consider themselves knowledgeable about coffee (this is also reflected in our survey, in that while 68.75% of respondents consider quality of coffee very important, only 37.5% rated price as important).

People are willing to spend more for quality. However, the rise in consumer coffee sales also means that people are frequenting coffee shops for other reasons – proximity to home or work was rated “not that important” by 43.75%, with only 25% rating it “very important”. The comparative lack of importance of child friendliness and price tell the other half of this tale. Coffee shops (especially with sit-in business) is seen as a small luxury – an escape from the responsibilities of daily life (81.25% responded that atmosphere was important or very important).

This is key for any coffee retailer – a 2011 study by Bord Bia found that overwhelmingly people felt coffee was not a luxury item, and that good quality coffee was available from inexpensive discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl – it was part of their daily lives. Our own survey shows that coffee shops specifically are not part of that trend. Atmosphere is important, quality of coffee is important, having to travel to the establishment isn’t, nor is any coffee shop’s catering for families.

This is what coffee shops are competing on – not on producing a product that’s already been cheaply stocked up on in your customers’ own homes, but on a relaxing atmosphere, a quality product and a reprieve from those very homes, just for a little while.

Still Blasting Customers Out of It

Customer Music

Customer Perceptions Ltd. have recently updated a survey they first conducted in 2008 and it suggests that over 70% of Piped, Background and Store Music serves to satisfy the taste of staff but is often disliked by customers.

Over 400 Customers and 200 Staff were surveyed in 70 outlets across the Island of Ireland in June. The outlets ranged from fast food outlets to middle class restaurants and top hotels, from fashion boutiques to department stores, auto accessories shops, mobile phone retailers, small and larger supermarkets and stationers & newsagents.

Customer Perceptions has experience of compiling some 340,000 “Mystery Shopping” reports for its clients over nearly 20 years but as Company Director, Emma Harte, explains; “We looked at this subject of in-store music about 8 years ago and we think it interesting that the findings have changed very little. The original idea of the survey started in our own canteen, most of our team agreeing that music in stores was often too loud or inappropriate for the target customer of the store in question”.

This year’s survey shows:

  • 86% of outlets staff selected the in-store music and its volume
  • 63% of cases, no formal policy exist regarding the background music selection
  • 88% of staff “liked the music played in their place of employment” (other than at Christmas time)

However

  • 58% of the customers surveyed said that they often find music levels much too loud
  • In-store music choices were disliked by 76% of the 45+ age group and 31% of the younger group
  • 59% of customers thought the music was “inappropriate for that specific store”
  • 28% of customers said that the piped music or radio was occasionally the cause of them leaving a store before they would otherwise do so or avoiding it altogether
  • 32% thought the music / radio in the background played “a significant role in the atmosphere and image created by the outlet”
  • 22% of customers said they never notice the music / radio one way or the other