Linking guest and staff feedback ‘a major opportunity’ for pub companies
The Customer Engagement Survey 2014 found just over 90% of companies see guest feedback as a top five key performance indicator (KPI) for their business, with 22% listing it as their number one KPI - 10% only rate it as “moderately” important and not a key focus.
While 95% believe employee engagement is “very important” in driving customer engagement, one-in-seven don’t track it and just 16% correlate employee engagement against customer satisfaction - although 33% say they intend to.
According to the research, the most common methods of measuring levels of staff engagement are by staff turnover and exit interviews, rather than by engaging while still on the workforce, although 54% of respondents do use online or paper surveys.
The five main recommendations of the survey are:
- Improve board-level buy-in – lead from the top, deliver at the front
- Get HR, marketing and operations to talk to each other and share data – especially amalgamating customer and employee feedback
- Link employee recognition and reward to customer KPIs
- Introduce real-time feed-back to frontline managers (and teams)
- Better understand the drivers of engagement.
“With the customer experience so dependent on service and staff quality, not to mention employee morale, this appears a major gap in the market’s insight. There’s a need for more joined-up thinking, especially when it comes to front-line teams”, said Peter Martin, vice-president of CGA Peach, which conducted the research for customer experience specialists InMoment (formerly Empathica).
The survey found that brands have more data available than ever before, with nine in 10 reporting an increase in the volume coming in over the last couple of years. The report also found that while about a third of chief executives will complain about too much data and not enough analysis being a barrier to delivering positive change, those at the top of organisations generally still see less value in that data than their frontline operations directors.
Outcomes
The majority of leaders, 71%, see employee recognition and reward based on customer KPIs as a way of driving positive outcomes on the frontline, with two-thirds saying that involving their ‘in-store’ teams in finding solutions will do the same. Only six out of 10, however, share real-time feedback with store or site managers.
Gary Topiol, managing director international at InMoment, said: “Businesses that are customer centric have the message clearly reinforced from the board down. They intertwine everything they do with this perspective – it is not something you do, but who you are.
“Distilling ever expanding volumes of data into simple and actionable messages is critical to a successful programme, while giving frontline staff the tools and support to build plans that are relevant to their local customer base is both empowering to the team and rewarding to their customers.”
Martin said: “This new piece of research, carried out in June, demonstrates there are quick wins to be had for companies to improve their engagement with their two most important groups of people. With frontline teams in restaurants and pubs responsible for delivering those great customer experiences, and with those same staff being the main contact point with the paying public, building better two-way communication between head office and site managers about their customers could become the biggest opportunity to gain competitive advantage.”
