How Standaard Boekhandel stays relevant as a physical retailer in omnichannel times
Belgium's market-leading book retailer swapped mystery shopping for a constant stream of real customer feedback — and lets customers set the priorities.
Standaard Boekhandel is a book retailer with a strong position as market leader in Belgium, with bookstores throughout the country. It wants to know how customers perceive the brand, to remain relevant in a competitive market that's becoming increasingly digital.
Books are a product with a digital version and heavyweight online competitors — which makes the people in the stores, and the customers who still walk into them, the difference. Commercial director Guido De Smet uses customer feedback to keep both at their best.
Market research requires a lot of preparation and time. Hello Customer delivers us a constant stream of feedback in real time and helps us understand how real customers perceive our company, our stores and the changes we implement along the way.
What they needed to solve
For a long time, the brand and its stores were evaluated through mystery shopping and market research. Real-time reality looked different — and reaching it meant changing how the whole company thinks about feedback.
Mystery shopping and market research evaluated brand and store performance, but Standaard Boekhandel wanted real-time insights from real customers.
With competition from platforms like bol.com and Amazon, the company needed to understand how to stay relevant as a physical retailer.
Everyone in the company had to adopt a customer-centric mindset and see feedback as a chance for improvement — not as a control mechanism.
How Standaard Boekhandel uses Hello Customer
Customers are more informed and more demanding, and increasingly share their opinions — mostly perceived as negative, but actually a positive thing. Where market research takes weeks of preparation, the platform delivers a constant real-time stream, and the dashboard shows each person the information relevant to their role — employee, manager or executive.
Most fixes are small: one store's recurring comment — 'the queue is too long, I only have an hour for lunch' — revealed lunch-break understaffing a mystery shopper would only catch by luck. Others are directive: customers kept writing that their store had no English books, loyal customers forced to a competitor for an easily fixed problem. Standaard Boekhandel increased its English-language assortment nationwide — and the feedback since confirms it was the right decision.
Customer culture is a team effort: recurring seminars bring all store teams together around a customer-centric mindset and turning satisfied customers into ambassadors. The branch with the best results shares its practices with colleagues — the stores with the highest scores help the others put customer centricity into practice.
What sets companies apart in an omnichannel environment is people. Feedback like 'we're happy to have a Standaard Boekhandel in our city' is a huge motivator, and employees quickly hear 'good job!' when they recommend the right book — immediate approval of the passion that makes them work there. Feedback also counters the human tendency to only see what's wrong: it makes the brand's strengths explicit.
Results
Standaard Boekhandel maintains its level of quality in a demanding, competitive market where its product also exists digitally. Feedback moved the company beyond the scores — it's not the number that matters, but what comes before it — and gave every employee a way to step back and ask how to do better, while feeling appreciated for a job well done.
The concrete wins add up: pickup time for online purchases dropped from two hours to half an hour, employees are coached to be responsive the moment a customer walks in, and decisions are made because the customer pointed them out as priorities — and the feedback confirms they pay off.
Hello Customer is our 'customer pulse monitor'. It keeps us nurtured with customer insights and makes sure we keep track of our performance so we can improve it. It's like putting on your activity tracker when you're going for a run: Hello Customer tells us if we're on track.Guido De SmetCommercial Director, Standaard Boekhandel
See what feedback could do for your team
Book a 30-minute walkthrough and we'll show you Hello Customer on your own customer feedback.
Book a demo →