Comparison to Traditional Methods

Within the business community there remains a demand for local / store level customer service research data. Traditional surveying (focus groups, paper, phone and face-to-face store intercept interviews) provides the opportunity to capture the voice of the customer at an aggregate level to gauge the overall customer experiences. However, due to high costs and logistical reasons, traditional surveying is impractical as a mechanism for monitoring the quality of operations and service levels as individual locations.

The only potential methods for local level data collection are mystery shopping and receipt based Internet surveys.

Mystery Shopping

Due to the extensive cost of mystery shopping data collection, a very limited data collection window (even one shop per week is aggressive) provides point in time data with little relevance for the measured time period. Additionally, the subjective nature of mystery shopping is biased, does not provide for true customer insights, and measures employee performance for a very limited time span.

Receipt Based – Internet Surveys

For internet based surveys, the major difficulty is response rates. The industry problem can be defined as “well intentioned consumers who are busy” - the delay to data collection combined with hectic lifestyles, provide for low response rates. The industry is definitely looking for a “faster, better, cheaper” local data collection model.

The overriding comparison of this patented data gathering technique to the competition surfaces a new level of customer intelligence based on the perpetual surveying process rather than project or point in time reporting. Also, in traditional forms of customer satisfaction measurement systems the cost of measurement multiplies per respondent / survey. With this technology, increased volume of data is encouraged because the cost of the survey process is not dependent upon number of respondents or the number of reports. This transactional level data gathering technology is a next-generation solution that delivers a level of reporting that is not possible using data derived from traditional market research services. Additionally, no other data gathering mechanism affords the opportunity to capture the fluctuations in customer service appropriate to hold individual staff and department teams accountable for the quality of service performed.