‘Being Easy To Buy From’ is a fundamental ingredient of 3D Characteristic #3 Creating Delighted and Devoted Customers (Click here for more info) and it’s clear that many businesses still don’t get it! One such business is Marks & Spencer who have been shown as having a ‘high effort score’ in research highlighted in Marketing Week.
The Customer Effort Score rates businesses on how easy they are to buy from, and the report highlighted that Iceland and Morrisons had the lowest ‘effort scores’, whereas Marks & Spencer was rated highest.
Although 58% of consumers say that M&S stores are clean and tidy, better rated than any other supermarket,
- Only 17% say it does not ‘take any longer than necessary to get what I need’ and…
- Only 24% that ‘it is easy to find my way around the store’.
These ratings are lower than any other supermarket in the study. Interestingly M&S rates highly when it comes to the quality of their products, 48% of customers say that their food is always fresh and well within use-by dates and 46% say ‘I feel like I am buying the best quality groceries/goods possible’. However, it might be fresh, it might be high quality, but if you can’t find it, you can’t buy it and that’s a problem!
Now if they’d listened to their customers, they would have discovered this some time ago – my mum, a ‘traditional’ Marks & Spencer customer for some 40 plus years has been telling me you can’t find your way around at all (and all her friends agree apparently!).
The point is that ‘being easy to buy from and deal with’ should be a focus for all businesses. We encourage our clients to ‘stand in their own queues’ to see what they are like to do business with – both online and offline. That means contacting the business as a customer would to find out what it’s really like when it comes to ‘customer experience’.
So why not find out what your business is like? Go on… ring up your own business, make an enquiry on your own website, put in a request to your accounts department (and while I’m at it, listen to your own answer machine message!)
Identify the blockages in your systems and processes and remove them!
You might also want to try….
- Asking your front line staff what stops them delivering great customer experiences
- Asking your customers what they think
Crucially, the key is to then do something about it what you discover!
