High Street retailer focuses strategy around customer experience management programme

High Street retailer focuses strategy around customer experience management programme

Frozen food specialist Iceland has this week announced a new direction in its customer strategy, focused on feedback from real consumers about their actual experiences with the retailer.

The ‘My Iceland’ programme, developed in partnership with customer feedback expert Empathica, is designed to capture feedback from Iceland customers and identify issues that help the brand improve on key areas impacting their customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Listening to real customer experiences

“We wanted to send a clear message to our customers that we’re here to listen to their feedback and exceed expectations when it comes to their Iceland experience.” said Steve Pennington, Iceland retail operations manager.

“The thinking behind the new programme came from wanting our customers to feel that Iceland is at the heart of their community and that we welcome their feedback to help us improve. It’s about moving past static measures of performance to a more dynamic, fluid strategy that gauges how real customers interact with and perceive our business.”

Laura Ellis, trading operations manager at Iceland, added: “All the supermarkets are slashing their prices to encourage shoppers to shop with them. We already offer excellent value for money, and want to show our customers that they can get great value and excellent service every day at Iceland – that’s our point of difference.”

Complementay feedback mechanisms

Running alongside its current mystery shopping initiative, the new programme assesses the customer experience in Iceland stores, as well as with their delivery service and feeds the data back to location managers. The programme generates in excess of 1,000 customer responses per day across Iceland’s 750 UK stores, with the data then used to implement operational changes with store level employees that have an immediate impact on the company’s customer satisfaction levels.

Pennington continued: “The new programme has also proven to be hugely motivating and empowering for our employees, as it allows customers to identify where they have received exceptional service and feedback to individual members of our team. The Empathica system generates a customer ‘WOW’ and flags up the comment to the store manager, which has helped massively with getting buy in from our store teams – the programme has quickly become part of the Iceland DNA.”

Integrating social media channels

As part of the new initiative, Iceland has also implemented Empathica’s GoRecommend, a social media advocacy system designed to amplify the reach of real customer recommendations of their Iceland experience and products purchased, using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Pennington added: “The response we’ve had through using GoRecommend has been phenomenal. In the first week alone, we were able to amplify positive and personal customer comments to over 200,000 Facebook users, which has in turn resulted in a massive uplift in traffic to Iceland.co.uk. It’s fantastic that, at such an early stage in the programme, Empathica is helping to drive real change within the business.”