Improve your in-store experience with customer feedback

Cassis-Paprika is a Belgian fashion retail group. Paprika positions itself as the plus-size brand for women’s fashion, with a strong focus on excellent store experience. Its mission is to make every customer feel at home. Thanks to Hello Customer, Cassis-Paprika can achieve their mission by collecting feedback from their shops in real time so they can continuously improve the customer experience in-store.

Their challenges:

1. Cassis-Paprika wants to make a difference with the service in their stores and maintain a strong position because the customer has become more demanding with the big online offering.
   
   
2. Cassis-Paprika measured satisfaction through mystery shopping, but this didn’t provide enough insights. They wanted a tool that offers real-time insights to improve store experience continuously.
   
   
3. Cassis-Paprika was looking for a tool that could position customer feedback and mystery shopping in a more positive way with their teams. The personnel at Cassis-Paprika perceived it too much as a control mechanism.
   
   
4. Cassis-Paprika wanted insights not only on service but also on variety, in-store offering, and price, as these are crucial drivers for retail companies.

1. Engage your employees with customer feedback 

The mystery shopping in their stores evaluated the full shopping experience: from being welcomed in the store until check-out. But once Cassis-Paprika received the results, they felt like they missed its goal.
Shop employees mostly focused on the negative comments and started pointing out other’s mistakes. With Hello Customer they capture a lot of positive feedback, next to the negative comments, and in real time. This way the stores know precisely what they excel in, but also where opportunities for improvements lie.

“We really see customer feedback as a possibility to do better. That’s why we run through all of the feedback with the employees so they can see and read for themselves how they can make the difference. That has a reassuring effect.”

2. Find strategic and operational insights

When it comes to feedback you need to make a difference between what the stores can change themselves, and what should be picked up by management. “We see that customers are mostly negative about the prices of our clothing, but they are most positive about the staff: the help they get, the contact they make and their enthusiasm. These elements are shared with the shop employees.

But some things our store teams don’t have an impact on, like the price-quality ratio or the offering in the store. Those things need to be shared with management or other departments, but not the stores. One example was that there’s a lack of good basics in our stores, we shared that with our purchasing department so we can offer more basics at a correct price.”

The feedback also gives insight into other aspects like communication. “Not every store employee is equipped to deal with an aggressive customer for example. That is why we initiated communication and service trainings for our shop teams and we’re developing a tool to improve the communication in stores.”

3. Communicate with your teams about the tool

It is crucial that employees don’t experience a feedback platform as a control mechanism. “The first step is to explain why we use this tool. What are the benefits for everyone in the company? Next, we look together with them how we can use the feedback and insights to create more fans and promotors in our store and how we can use the platform to coach people, not control them. Creating promotors in your stores is key in a time when there’s a large offering online too.”

“We want the tool to resonate throughout the whole organisation.” The tool was first implemented by the management, later middle management and the district managers became involved as well. The district managers make sure that the right information flows to the stores. And lastly, the stores get direct access to the results.

Communication and transparency about the tool are essential to make people feel confident about it. We share experiences and success stories with our people and brainstorm together about what they can take away from it. What is positive? What should they share with store teams and how can they turn this into future successes? We also encourage our employees to come up with ideas themselves.”

1.  Increase in NPS. “We rounded up October 2020 with an NPS of 67, the year after it was 68. This year our NPS is 69 and sometimes it peaks above 70. At those moments we make sure to reward the teams that manage and work with the feedback from our customers.”
2. High response rates. “We experience a high level of participation from our customers, with an average response rate of 10% in our stores. Customers really value the fact that they can share their opinion. In turn, every feedback they give is valuable to us.”
3. Improved sales performance. By measuring feedback both in stores and online, they can continuously improve the experience and exceed customer expectations.
4. Across-the-board insights. The feedback delivers them insights about different business goals and KPIs leading to the implementation of communication and service trainings, sharing insights with their purchasing department to make improvements to their offering and a critical look at how they price their products.