The Experience Strategy Podcast: The New Era of Experience Management

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Most businesses only collect feedback from 1% of their customers and by the time they’ve reviewed it, it’s too late to effectively respond. It’s time to address the problem of biased and irrelevant customer research. Georgina Nelson, Founder of TruRating, joins us to discuss how she’s helping her clients collect actionable and contextual customer feedback at point-of-sale. Tune in to hear why it’s time to let go of Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Voiceover: [00:00:00] This is the experience strategy podcast, where we look at the best and the worst customer experiences and ask what were they thinking? And now here are your hosts experience, nerds, Dave Norton and Aransas Savvis.

Aransas: Welcome to the experience strategy podcast. I'm Moran. And I'm Dave Norton. So Dave, this is going to be a fun one.

Today. We are joined by Georgina Nelson, the founder of true rating, who is here to talk to us about a problem. We both know too well, which is the problem with our currently deeply bias. Incomplete and frankly, misguiding customer research. And I think what we're going to hear about today is a much more intuitive way of collecting in the moment.

[00:01:00] Contextual insight from a much broader sampling of our customers than we ever have before. What are you excited about today?

Dave: Dave? You're absolutely right. The issue at hand is. The number of people who actually fill out surveys compared to the number of people who actually have experiences, uh, with retail environments, we're going to be focused more specifically on retail environments today, but the issue is across all industries and Georgina, as the founder of terrain has come up with a fantastic approach where they ask one randomized question.

At the point of sale moment for retailers, uh, that allows them to understand much more the con situation that, uh, their customers are [00:02:00] dealing with on a day-to-day basis on an hourly basis, and tie that directly to revenue. Amount spent in a particular basket so that because they're getting the feedback at the exact same time that they're checking out and so they can tie.

Directly to response. So this is a fantastic approach, uh, that they've created. They're just in the beginning stages. I think of something very big and we're excited to talk to truly, I love

Aransas: that we can call them in the beginning with over 250 million ratings already collected, but you're right. It's just scratching the surface and.

As excited as I am about the individual bits of data. I'm excited to see what emerges from the trends within these data sets. All right. So let's bring Georgina into the room and hear from her [00:03:00] why she created this new way of collecting data and what she believes the potential for. Georgina. Thank you so much for joining us today.

So to kick things off, tell us a little about true rating and what

Georgina: you do. Thank you, firstly, for having me today, it's a pleasure to be with you and Dave. So true rating is basically a way to. Give consumers a voice back to businesses and a far easier, quicker and anonymous manner. I, uh, yeah, I recognize that businesses here from usually less than 1% of their customers, and most of that feedback is heard, you know, days or weeks after the event.

And when you speak to businesses, they all say understanding what their customers think about them as the most important thing to them. But then when you actually peel the onion back, they don't actually have any real data, which they can trust. And action. So two [00:04:00] rating is setting about to go into.

Dave: You know this issue of, uh, businesses only hearing back from 1% of customers that is a big deal because there are so many people that are just kind of not being represented, uh, and their experiences are not being understood because of survey fatigue.

You know, it seems like there's a, there is a certain type of customer that will respond to a survey. And then there's all of these customers that are just like, that is not what I want to be doing. How do you address that Georgina?

Georgina: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Like I first started off in psychology and it's then what I really got to grips of sampling bias and how important representation is.

I think businesses today here. From the really agitated, you know, those people who are really might be really excited and happy about an [00:05:00] element of their experience, but more often than not, if the people who complain and are angry and, you know, it's this issue that they receive this feedback and they end up responding to just the shouty people.

When the boss silent, majority of us who never feedback, we never take the time. Uh, go unrepresented. And so when you think, you know, I guess the question to both of you, why don't, why don't you feed back to businesses today? Why don't you fill in the questions?

Dave: Um, you know, ah, that's a great question. I'll go, I'll go first then.

I'd love to hear what your point of view is on this or ANSYS. You know, sometimes I do. So oftentimes if it's very simple and easy, uh, You have some sort of a rating, but I get really frustrated with the fact that companies, uh, it, it feels a little bit, sometimes like a game [00:06:00] to me where people are like, Hey, if you don't fill out this survey, I'm not going to be at my best or I'm, uh, I'm being rated on this particular aspect.

And so I find myself really struggling with that whole approach. And, you know, it's the classic thing where somebody, uh, hand you the survey and basically, or send you the link to the survey and basically says, if I don't get a 10 I'm, you know, I didn't do a good job for you. Wink wink. Can you give me a 10?

And that part really frustrates me. The other part that I always think about is something that Joe pine taught me a long time ago, which is the survey is actually part of the experience and what you're doing. And to a large degree is changing. The memory of the experience by saying it's not a part of the experience that the experience was, is over before you get to [00:07:00] that part of the memory.

I don't know if that makes any sense or not, but those are the two reasons I don't or ANSYS. How about you?

Aransas: Um, and I think that's a really interesting point about the signaling for me. It is really just that I'm apathetic.

I don't care that much in the moment I care when it's been amazing. And I care when it's been awful, but most of the time, I just, I'm not moved enough to feel motivated. To share a perspective. And I think we've been conditioned to believe that it's a big, heavy lift to share feedback because most of the time we're asked to answer 5,000 questions.

And then could you answer one more long form paragraph

Georgina: and, uh, yeah. It's um, when, when both of you speak, it brings me to mind a girl on my team came up and gave me. [00:08:00] Really long survey to me. And she'd, she'd just been into a car dealership where that said, can you fill in this survey for me please? Um, again, we need to get a 10, otherwise we're going to lose our license or whatever.

Um, we have to maintain a reset and a certain mark, and she gave it to me and it had questions on her salary bracket, her marital status, including my emptiness and her sexual orientation. And then, you know, and, and she is gay and she said to me like, why, why do they need to know that, you know, do they want to build a call for gay people?

You know, why do they meet that kind of, it's quite new to Chris. And, uh, and so I think, you know, I think we've, we've all become very much disenfranchised with when we just wants a feedback quickly on an element of the experience that suddenly it becomes this. Often, very personal data mining, and we have to give our personal data details.

Then we find out we want [00:09:00] some marketing list and, and it's, you know, it demands an effort and patience, which most of us just simply don't have in our lives anymore. And so I was thinking of how can we still get that data back to businesses? And if you make feeding back to businesses super quick, super simple.

And if you make it in the moment, I'm sure my thesis was you'd have far more people engaging and, you know, and, and everyone I think is more or less happy to answer one simple, quick question. And that was, that was my belief. And I thought if you could get everyone answering one simple question, then you could rotate those questions.

So all those questions, which may be on a survey, which you would want to, once we investigate. Just rotate them and then you can get statistically significant trends across those key questions over time. And so that was the thesis of true [00:10:00] rating. And it was, how can you ask in a moment? And the idea was leveraging that, that payment device in a retail environment, when you're looking at it waiting to take your car, Um, you could ask a simple question and it doesn't have to be an emotional one.

What do you think of the brand? It could be where you greeted in store today, or did you find the products you were looking for or do you like the music?

Aransas: You know, I'm a huge fan of this Georgina because I worked in a company where we struggled with this year after year, we were so desperate to hear from our customers.

And yet every time we looked at the feedback we were getting, it felt incredibly biased because I mean, in truth, we were hearing from the same demographic over and over again, and it was not representative of our overall customer pool. Right. Frankly, the people who had the discretionary [00:11:00] time to talk to us at length.

And so we had these huge sample sizes and we were so proud and we thought, oh, we're making these great decisions. And look at us, we know what our customer wants, but in truth, we knew what a customer one. That 75 year old white woman was so well cared for.

Dave: That is so hilarious. You know, and one of the things, I don't know if you meant to do this or not, but one of the things that you've done that's really revolutionary is you've.

Move to the survey off of the who and you focused instead on the what or on the situation, you know, and that has been, that's a radical movement. I say

Aransas: that one more time. I want people to really hear what you're saying there, Dave unpacking.

Dave: All right. So you may have heard us talking in some of the things that we're doing [00:12:00] with, uh, excuse me.

I apologize. I'm actually doing this podcast from home and wouldn't, you know, that they decided to start sign in my basement. I'm working on my basement right now. So that

Aransas: background noise.

Dave: Right, right. But what's amazing. What's amazing about what's what you've done Georgina is that, um, For the last 20 years, we've been hearing it when it comes to jobs to be done theory that companies need to focus much more on the, what they're doing and less on the who. And yet increasingly all of the survey tools are all about.

Who, who, who, that's, why they were asking the demographic information that was so personal. And yet the best innovation has come from really understanding the, what, the situation that people find themselves in. [00:13:00] That's the thing that has made the biggest difference, your approach, where you randomly ask people different questions really gets at the what, and doesn't emphasize at all the who.

I don't know if you intended to do it that way or not, but it's, it's a radical shift in the way that we think about, um, asking questions.

Georgina: Yeah. I think when we built two rating, it was very much about how can we ensure that customer feedback is actionable. And the, it can be used as an operational tool rather than some CX brand strategy, which was in the, which was just in the boardroom.

We wanted to help businesses actually understand what was happening down in our store or location situation as you call it. Literally minute by minute, hour by [00:14:00] hour. And when you speak to businesses who have these legacy CX programs, because it's because I using all these, these survey tools, which get a tiny percent, they, they actually just can't provide that situational context.

Because it's only ever going to be, you know, a few survey responses at a store a week or a month, but never really enough for you to get an idea about what's happening hour by hour. And so, because of our representation and because of the way we hear from, you know, an a store on average, 80% of customers respond to our question, then suddenly you really begin to can get that real time pulse of what's happening at the store level.

And are people being greeted when they walk in, um, are they being offered help and the change in women's can they find what they're looking for? And that means that then [00:15:00] you can begin to look at training. You can begin to look at shift scheduling, um, you know, rewarding teams on actually met metrics, which really really matter.

And often I think. The traditional CX brand metrics. Aren't actually tied to key things which a business really worries about, which is, you know, baseline revenue and how often our customers will return. And because we've integrated with all the payments providers who build that payments technology, we get all that data around how much somebody spends what's in their basket, how often they were.

But as you said, taking the who out of it is all completely anonymous and just on an aggregate level, but that ultimately means, again, it's an operational tool with an automatic, although why calculated, built in, you can see us still level, but actually providing good service is a career in new this much more in revenue, you [00:16:00] know, per week per month.

This survey strategy is going to have a business case where you're going to make that either wide back within this time. And I think that's another key reason why CX needs a, an overhaul. It needs to start really delivering, you know, delivering value and be actionable for the business.

Aransas: It's so true for so long.

I think we've been measuring the wrong things and we design these amazing experiences and we put them into the world and we assume, I think that they look like they did on paper or in our labs. And then they get out into the world and there's 10,000 variables. That we can't account for because every location and every service provider and every cultural nuance has an effect on the reception of those by the customer.

And that's one of the things that I have to say as an experience, strategist and [00:17:00] designer, it gets me really excited about the way you're approaching this, because it lets me get into. The nuances and still see the themes that emerge do. I don't think it really is about one or the other, but it's about looking at both of these side by side, understanding the global trends as well as the micro trends at the store level and an hour by hour basis.

Georgina: Yeah, I completely agree.

Aransas: So what are your customers saying? The people who are, who are using this feedback who have shifted over to this way of working.

Georgina: Yeah, happy, happy. They love us. Um, it's, it's very, it's interesting who are, who our sponsors tend to be. Initially. It's very much the operations folk who need this data to better manage their business and their teams and the way we've built our interfaces.

Again, you know, coming out from it. [00:18:00] It's like many entrepreneurs I've arrived during a business, which I had no experience, previous experience. And, and so the dashboard was very much built for, you know, the store manager, the regional manager, you know, those people who, uh, want to be able to quickly flick on their phone and see what action they need to take within the next few minutes, rather than, you know, the PhD statistician who is going to be sitting isolated in a tower in.

So we have been quickly picked up as an operational tool, but what's also interesting is how other, other parts of the business recognize actually, we've just moved a spinal, all this marketing spend on this ad campaign. And we have no idea whether it's making people come into the stores, how it's changing perceptions of the brand.

Actually, why don't we leverage two rating and ask a question? On that aspect or, you know, we want to, [00:19:00] we want to launch curbside pickup. Um, but you know, each store has a snowflake with different demographics surrounding it and, and different appetites of the consumers. Let's use two rating to test where we should start that pilot of that initiative.

And let's use two rating to work out that over why. And so it's, it's, we've really become entrenched in the fabric of how, yeah. How many businesses, right. AB test strategies, KPI performance, manage their teams and actually make strategic decisions on data, which they can trust. So it's, uh, it's very exciting to be part of the journey where the yeah.

With our first.

Dave: All right. That's just fantastic. And I CA I can imagine that retailers all over the world with all of the challenges that they've had to deal with over the last couple of years are desperate for this type of real time, uh, information being [00:20:00] provided to them, uh, because so much has changed.

And I think that there's also, I would imagine, I don't know, but there's also a. Certain amount of humility that a lot of retailers are, are like, I just, I just need help right now. I need, I need to be able to figure things out in a different way. I can't rely on the old tools that I've used over such a long period of time, uh, to help figure them figure things out.

Georgina: I know I'm Deloitte just, just came out with a stat, which was 80% of CEO. Post the COVID pandemic and saying they need to get closer to their customers, which sort of makes me to ask what the other 20% are thinking, because in terms of how quickly consumer behavior is evolving and changing, and we've just polled 200,000 north American consumers on emotional loyalty.[00:21:00]

And really seeing how that has changed, uh, over the last few months as people well, and a uncoupling couple of years, but as people want to move away from just being tied to discounts with loyalty cards to actually. My loyalty is going to be driven by my emotional affiliation with those brand values, um, and how, how that brand aspires to, uh, to be a better retailer or whatever.

And, uh, and I think that's, that's really interesting and we're, we're definitely seeing the pace of change with consumers is, is quick and retailers and all businesses need to be on the pulse of those changes. And I think. You know, as we look at the acceleration, which has happened in digital during COVID, we obviously made a big push to offer a similar service to cross across digital channels.

So one [00:22:00] question, and then you can provide further quantitative feedback. And I think that's been really interesting looking at how, you know, to say even the word channel sounds nearly out of date now as well. Um, but how consumers interact with brands and retailers? All these different touch points of the consumer journey.

And I think pre COVID many, you know, many retailers would have different CX solutions from, with that econ digital team versus the in-store team. And I think now everyone's emergencies. Actually, we need to be speaking. Consumers with one voice, we need to have one methodology. We need to be able to contrast and compare what people are saying to us at these different touch points and, and, uh, yeah.

Have one view. And I think that's definitely, definitely a change, which we're riding the wave or

Aransas: okay. Couldn't agree more. How is true rating helping with that? [00:23:00] So

Georgina: we, we, uh, we basically. Obviously we have our installed proposition where you have made 2% of your customers. And then online, we have about 50% of customers online.

And, and then we do after the event. So we integrate into email surveys because many customers have really struggled with. Uh, of goods, you know, whether it's shortages, um, reliance on third party delivery partners who are, who are overstretched. And there's been a lot of consumer complaints about, you know, when parcels arrive, et cetera.

And so being able to ask those really simple questions, which rotate across those channels and have them all feed one overarching dashboard, but what's important is you can really begin to then adopt. Uh, question strategy, which encompasses that more. And so in real time, you're saying, okay, well, we can see people are saying.

Online [00:24:00] when there, when they've had this journey or they have these items in their basket, let's react and ask something similar to that in store, or let's dive deeper as to once they got that product home. Wha how did that perception change? And so it's really taking that full. And having that real time reaction to what you're, what you're seeing, which again, I just think it's a very agile approach.

We speak to so many businesses and they're like, look, we're stuck on MPS. You know, we've been using NPS for like the last, you know, how many years, decades we don't change the questions which we ask a customer and it's, and it's very, it's very static. And I, uh, yeah, I don't think. It evokes agile, quick pace action change, which is, I think what all retailers need for,

Aransas: what do you mean from a psychological standpoint?

People aren't able to imagine their [00:25:00] future actions. Well,

Dave: right. I I'm laughing cause we did a whole episode on the, um, NPS plateau. That mean in the initial stages, there is some help that. NPS provides, but then you hit a plateau in different companies, hit it at different places, and then they just, it just stops right there. And, and, uh, there's a lot of companies that are hitting that plateau.

Um, it's not our favorite metric. So

Aransas: let's talk about that. What is the problem with.

Georgina: Well, we, you know, looking, looking back at Iowa, uh, history with NPS, obviously a lot of our customers come to us and they're like, this is, you know, this is what our investors expect of us. You know, there's just something which we've reported on in our annual reports.

And so can we ensure that that [00:26:00] question around recommends ability is asked on, you know, as part of the rotation set with you writing. So we've asked the recommends question now, 14 million times across 150 retailers, uh, across our markets in north America, Europe and Australia. And what's really interesting is that often a brand might do really well in the NPS, but then actually really poorly or not, or not nearly as well.

Other metrics like, you know, the service which they're providing in store, the product range, et cetera, the value, and what became apparent to us was those brands which do very well in NPS it's often because people socially aspire to that brand, whether it's that price point, that fashion kudos that maybe that green ethics sort of stance, [00:27:00] but it's.

It's when you think about the actual question, would you likely recommend to family or friends it's often that social credibility is what will drive your answer to that question rather than actually how they perform on key metrics, which Metta. Those other metrics are, have much closer protection to future health and of the bit future financial health of the business, which we found a closer than NPS it's too much of a simplistic, uh, overarching brand level score, which doesn't actually really tell a business.

This is what you need to change. You know today at this location to drive revenue and repeat visits.

Dave: Yeah. I, I w what strikes me about the way that you described that? And I honestly, hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about this particular aspect is that if you're a [00:28:00] premium brand, your NPS scores are likely to be hired, just because people aspire to those, to those brands.

An everyday brand that is trying to, um, provide real value. Um, your NPS scores are likely to be lower just because, um, people can aspire to it so much. Then you put on top of that, everything that has happened with COVID and so forth. And how do you be a premium brand in that kind of an environment curbs?

It's really hard to be. I think, I would assume a premium brand when you're providing curbside service or delivery takes away a lot of the in-store, um, experience. And it makes the product pretty much every product shows up in an Amazon package anyways. So, um, so that. That further kind of [00:29:00] affects. It seems to me the impact of that overall one score type of an approach.

That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about that.

Georgina: Yeah. And you know what we w because of our integration with obviously the payments payments in store and the shopping basket online, we can very quickly see. You know what question is most correlated and predicted to how much someone will spend in that moment and how frequently they return and for different brands and different retailers.

Different questions for high-end retailer. It's likely going to be, um, that, you know, consumers want to see a certain behavior about, of the store staff, whereas for, you know, fast paced grocer, grocery customer, it's going to be a different driver to how often people return. And I think just simply [00:30:00] relying on, on NPS.

Yeah. Eradicates and, and simplifies. Yeah. Which are, you know, which are critically important to businesses, understanding how they can, how they can do better and improve that will symbolize.

Dave: Absolutely. So

Aransas: let's talk about what we take from all of this. I mean, I think in general, what I'm hearing is the hit of course, from the MPS friend alone.

Not the, the business driving decision-maker that we once thought it was. And I think a lot of companies went all in on NPS, but what we're hearing here is that specific situational data is going to give us a much better read on our customers in general. And. Context in the moment, the specific operational opportunities that exist.

What are the other big [00:31:00] lessons that you're taking from your work and what you're seeing emerge through this new way of data collection? Uh, let's, let's start with you Georgina.

Georgina: Yeah, I, I think we're at the beginning of the journey and that in the power of what this can deliver, not just for businesses, but also for consumers.

So my background, a, uh, my last, my last love chapter, I was a consumer lawyer at a company called which, which is the equivalent of consumer reports. And we will always on this drive to try and. Good trustworthy data in the hands of consumers on, on which they could make decisions on. And I did a lot of work on the likes of Yelp and TripAdvisor, where, you know, we saw that over 30% of their reviews were fake.

And I know a lot of undercover work has been done for the likes of Amazon, Google reviews, et [00:32:00] cetera. And, and I think as well as providing better data to businesses, This data needs to be provided back to consumers for us all to make better choices. And I think that drives the loyalty to continue rating in that future engagement as part of that ecosystem.

And so we have sinned a retailer's ratings, which they received to us with Google. And so basically build a page which is equivalent to Yelp or TripAdvisor, but rather than, you know, Yeah, I'll peruse over the past five years. Um, you know, many, uh, when you, when you read that and you think that someone's mom wanting that person to get a promotion and the other one is someone who's buying for a, uh, for a flee male, um, you know, it's actually representative trustworthy and really high volume.

And so for a consumer, getting that. That validity of [00:33:00] social proof and seeing that volume of, of ratings and then for a business that been sync to Google and that being able to drive social proof and organic SEO, I think is really key. And so that's, that's a really, that's a key part of what we do. And I think is really exciting in that whole, the whole review space.

And I think we're going to be seeing a lot more, a lot more of that as, as people really pushed her to get reviews, which we can trust.

Dave: So fantastic what you're doing. And to me that, um, the big takeaway is that you've come to this from a standpoint of trying to help operations, better understand what's going on in the situation that they find themselves in. This is another example of this big movement that is happening, uh, amongst consumers toward a [00:34:00] focus on context.

They experience a retail environment in a particular situation in, uh, in context. And. What you're providing through trading, I think is a very important data point on what that context context is so that companies can respond contextually to their customers. And customers can really understand a much more local type of an experience that that's fantastic.

And I think that's the future of where retail needs to go and where other categories need to go.

Georgina: I'm very excited about the future. I think it's going to be great. And I'm very excited about working with you guys and the fantastic stem mental team. Leslie, we get business data.

Aransas: Yes. And that's really the thing like these companies [00:35:00] are made or broken based on these decisions and it's high time.

Somebody figure out a way. To represent the overall customer need. Here it is the moment. Yeah, especially as we look at all the changes that have happened to payment processing over the past year and how higher, how much higher the expectation is of a cashless transaction in every interaction. And so the fact that you have integrated seamlessly into that touchless transaction, um, and a really a really simple.

Contextual way. I feel like it's just, it's just the start of something really, really important emerging and how we understand and respond to our customer needs. Thank you so much for giving us a sneak peek into the early days of this work. I am really. [00:36:00] Interested to see the trends that emerge as you get into more categories and get an even bigger global data set.

So I hope you'll come back and share some more about that with us and, uh, maybe some more about how we replace NPS with something. Meaningfully represents our customer's needs and therefore can drive our business decisions. Thank you again for being here and for sharing your learnings with us. Georgina.

Thank you so much. And thank you all for listening. Lots more in store on our next episode. In fact, you will hear a bit of a companion piece to this. Another way of capturing customer data and re. So come back for more next week.