How can companies balance the complexities with the benefits of mobile customer feedback?
Gathering customer feedback can be a laborious process. Gain participating for such input as satisfaction surveys is difficult enough. Persuading customers to fill out a comment card or go online after eating a meal or returning an item is can be even more challenging because of the time lag between the event and the survey. Some companies are moving to the mobile channel to gain more real-time insight while delivering a better customer experience to those customers who provide feedback. There are many positives and negatives to such an approach.
The Pros
“There is no bigger opportunity to efficiently capture customer feelings about a company’s products or services at the point of experience,” says Noel Chandler, CEO of Mosio. “Ninety-eight percent of mobile phones are SMS enabled out of the box with 94 percent of all mobile users having SMS as part of their mobile plans. Nine out of 10 people walking down the street don’t have a pen in their pocket to fill out a comment card, but everyone has their phone with them.”
Boston Pizza is one company tapping into the potential that represents.
The eatery is one of Canada’s largest casual dining franchises, with 340 restaurants. Last year it began testing the mobile waters with text messaging at 30 of its restaurants. The goal was engagement, and it is the first step in its mobile customer feedback strategy, says Paul Pascal, regional vice president of operations for Ontario and Atlantic Canada.
“Mobile tools are a great way to engage our guests,” he says. “They can provide instant feedback. The objective is to find more ways to get feedback from customers. People are getting inundated with email trash, so we wanted to leverage mobile as a way to interact with them in a fun way.”
Read the full article here.