Mindshare™ facilitates customer feedback
Have you ever had such a lousy experience in a restaurant that you just wanted to smack the server upside the head?
Perhaps it happened at the corner grocery store or some other type of retail outlet.
You know what I mean — the clerk (or server) ignores you, or acts uninterested, or is unconcerned or oblivious to any discomfort or problems you may be having. It makes you want to scream.
That is how I felt the other night — my birthday night — the night the family decided to take me out for dinner.
We show up, all seven of us, at a local outlet of a national chain the night of the NCAA men's basketball finals. In other words, the joint was not crowded at all, which meant that there were extra servers and bussers all over the place.
And yet you would have thought it was the busiest night of the year given the lousy service.
How bad was it? Well, the worst part was when the seven entrees showed up in three shifts: two at first, four about 10 minutes later, and then the final entree (the entree for our youngest daughter) about five minutes after that.
It was ridiculous.
The worst part is that I'm sure the server was absolutely clueless about how I felt.
Me, I have no problem letting management know when I've had a bad experience. Dittos for exceptional service. And this particular evening, the manager (to her credit) was almost apoplectic at how poorly we had been treated, which is also why I am not going to rip on her or her establishment by name in this column.
That said, not everyone is as comfortable as I am when it comes to telling a company off or sharing a bad experience with a service provider.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a quick, simple and non-threatening way to tell a company exactly how you felt about its great service or lack thereof?
Turns out there is.
Salt Lake City-based Mindshare Technologies helps companies do just that — provide customers with a quick, simple and non-threatening way to provide feedback to them.
According to company President and Chairman, Richard Hanks, Mindshare's solution is called CONNECT and that's exactly what it does — it connects front-line employees directly with their customers, the people they're responsible for serving day in and day out.
Typically categorized as Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR for short), CONNECT is a Web-based software program that can be set-up and operational in as little as an hour with surveys written and ready for customer feedback.
The surveys are created and stored on the Internet, and when a customer leaves a retail establishment with a purchase, the receipt has printed on it instructions on how to take a simple survey from a touch-tone phone, including a cell phone.
Most feedback surveys can be completed in less than three minutes and can be as simple as listening to the voice prompts and pushing the appropriate keys, or the process can include leaving voice recordings stored as MP3 files. To get customers to participate, companies generally offer some type of discount or incentive for a future visit.
Where the rubber really meets the road is on the server/clerk side as each survey is then retrievable directly from the World Wide Web, via e-mail or by fax, either by management or supervisors, or privately by the frontline employee.
Imagine how sheepish the server in an unnamed Salt Lake restaurant must have felt upon hearing a recording of a customer from the previous day complain that the clam chowder they had ordered didn't contain any clams. (Hanks swears this really happened. He also explained that many restaurants have their cooks focus on the main entrees, leaving the serve staff to handle such things as ladling clam chowder into bowls. And if you don't dip the ladle all the way to the bottom of the pan, you don't get clams in your clam chowder. Who knew?)
After years of trying to get her stylists to push/suggest conditioners and shampoos on customers when they paid their bills, Clara Osterhage, owner of 14 Dayton, Ohio-area Great Clips hair salon franchises decided to give CONNECT a try. Two months later, sales of hair care products in the salons had nearly trebled.
Osterhage and stylists also began hearing direct voice recordings from customers, such as:
"When you are cutting my son's hair, speak to him, not just to me."
"The stylist blew hair off of my neck with her mouth."
"My stylist never recommends any hair care products."
"It doesn't matter what I think, what the stylists think," Osterhage said. "It matters what the customers think."
Today Osterhage has CONNECT working in all 14 of her Great Clips franchise locations and she loves it.
Companies throughout Utah and around the United States are using Mindshare's CONNECT every day, although not all of them are comfortable letting others know that they're using the system. (I guess some companies are concerned customers might see it as a negative. I think anything that improves customer service is always a positive.)
The real amazing part about CONNECT is its price, which starts at $99 per month for as many as 100 completed surveys. Hiring a mystery shopper to go into a store or restaurant and then report back on the experience can easily cost that much per visit and often require weeks to get the report completed.
Prior to last week I had never even heard of Mindshare. If you're interested in learning more, check 'em out online at www.mshare.net.
And if you really want to know, drop me a line and I'll tell you the name of the restaurant, but don't ask for Greg as your server.
David Politis leads Politis Communications, a public relations, investor relations and marketing communications agency specializing in the high-tech and life science markets. E-mail: dpolitis@politis.com.
Mindshare Technologies' business monitoring tools help companies improve operational excellence and minimize customer attrition through personal customer involvement. Mindshare's proprietary survey technology captures the voice of the customer in real-time and immediately transforms it into actionable intelligence through powerful and incisive enterprise reporting. With Mindshare, companies can determine the type of information they collect, who can access it, and how it's reported. As a hosted system, Mindshare is affordable and flexible, with surveys and reports tailored to fit individual needs. The reports are web-accessible 24/7 or by timed email delivery. Mindshare serves more than 25 different industries including travel, hospitality, restaurant, financial, salon, automotive, and retail. Clients range from small regional chains to large multinational corporations. For information, visit www.mshare.net.
