Editor’s note: Danni Findlay is director of retail research at Marketing Sciences Unlimited, Winchester, U.K. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “Why do retailers need to listen to customers ‘in the moment’ of purchase.”
We have been told that living in-the-moment is the best way to focus on the issue in hand, concentrating on what we are doing now.
This idea of mindfulness has led me on to think about some of our customer experience and retail work at Marketing Sciences and the values of doing in-the-moment research – face-to-face in a store with the customer or at a laptop when consumers shop online – as opposed to a piece of research completed (usually online)a few days later.
By speaking to a customer in-the-moment you are likely to get closer to their real opinion of what happened during that experience, on that day and at that time. Questioning that is further removed from the experience is more prone to be cluttered by subjective matters of perception, values and other unrelated memories.
We have done research that shows a time delay on customers noticing the impact of a change to an in-store experience when they are interviewed via an online survey rather than in-store. The length of the time delay depends on a number of things including the type of retailer and how often the consumer visits the store. Changes will be seen more quickly for stores consumers visit often (such as supermarkets) and much more slowly, sometimes negligible, for stores visited less frequently (clothing or DIY retailers, for example).
The type of question also has an impact. If it is seen to be a more objective question, such as whether the customer noticed something (yes/no), then results can be picked up much more immediately. More subjective questions already linked with individual perceptions – for example, what it means to be clean or if something is a good value – do not see a change as quickly.
We know that customers, when surveyed online, need to see an improvement more than twice before they’ll change their perception of a brand. However, when they are interviewed in the store on the day of visiting, consumers are more likely to say, “Actually that was quite good today, and it isn’t usually.”Once a customer has left the store, any notion of that experience relies on memory of some sort. As time moves on, memory of the visit becomes more of a perception. While it is useful to understand a customer’s perception of your store (as that has a big role in whether they choose to visit you next time they have the need), we need to look carefully at what questions we are trying to answer.
If we are asking customers to notice specific improvements to a store and we are not interviewing at the time, we may need to be more objective in our questioning rather than relying on changes emerging from the more value-laden concepts we sometimes ask customers to comment on. If we are tracking, all retailers will have the same level of time-lag and we can allow for this in our interpretation.
This is not to undermine online research at all. In fact we conduct online research for retailers in different sectors and our studies do pick up these changes in context. It is important to understand the role for each method to determine what would be most suitable, as well as affordable.
A quick note on cost: online is often seen to be much cheaper than face-to-face leaving in-the-moment research looking less affordable. However, while this is certainly the case for some studies, in-store surveys for very tailored or tactical research can make finding a sample of interest easier (customers who are using the right stores on the right days). Very few online panels, or even customer databases, are large enough to speak to a sample of customers who have had a very recent and specific touch-point with the store in question. Even a customer’s own perception of whether they have been to a store in the past two months is affected by their perception of time.
Some clients worry that having interviewers in the store might affect the customer experience, as managers and staff may gear up when an interviewer is in store. Such corrective action suggests that they know they are not offering the best service possible and, depending on the questions we are asking, it is also possible to ask customers if this is the experience they usually have at this store. A very interesting finding when it is not.
Some retailers provide the invitation in-the-moment – via the means of an online survey link for vouchers or rewards at a later date. But the reality of this is that you may not complete the survey a few hours, days or (if you are anything like me) weeks later as you were engrossed in painting the room you bought the brush for.
Would it be different if the consumer had a terrible experience? Probably. Or a very good one? Maybe. But I doubt the consumer would storm through the door with the receipt feedback-form in-hand … or even try and access it on a smartphone in the parking lot trying to alleviate the stress before hitting the road!
The other benefit of in-the-moment research is that we can stop a selection of customers who, as long as the questionnaire is kept short, would answer about their trip when perceived as less effort than processing an online survey.
Avoiding biased consumer responses
If we rely only on those customers who choose to give us their opinions, we may be getting a biased view.
Reviewing negative feedback is a great way to improve but it needs to be put in context otherwise companies would spend all available time and budget trying to pacify every customer. By stopping a random selection of customers in-the-moment and using the advances in technology that allow researchers to flag any particularly negative scores about real (and current) experience and accompanying with verbatims to add real flavor.
I remember at the advent of online research people talked of the death of face-to-face interviewing. While many studies have moved in line, there are still a great number that have not. I put this exaggerated death down to the fact that online research is great for some things but cannot overcome the reliance on memory that in-the-moment research provides.
In the words of Proust:
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”