Is Your Customer Experience Aligned With Consumer Expectations?
Consumer recommendations serve as one of the most powerful tools available to any brand. In the past two decades, the Net Promoter Score® metric has served as a data point for these consumer recommendations, allowing your brand to easily understand its performance compared to industry competitors. The only real way to encourage a leading NPS® is to align the way customers perceive your brand with the way employees implement your Customer Experience platform. This requires measuring CX data, finding the story in the information and creating a corresponding action plan. An illustrative example of the value that the NPS® metric can have exists in the fast-casual space, where this organizational alignment can quickly vault your team ahead of the competition.
Gaining a competitive advantage in your industry requires understanding your organizational NPS® status, but this information does not mean anything without context. Thus, it is also important that you understand how your brand’s NPS® stacks up against competition, because a high NPS® score does not mean much if your direct competition is performing at a similar or elevated level.
Second To None completed a benchmark study of the fast-casual industry, focused on understanding the relationship between consumer perception and brand implementation of Customer Experiences. We based our study around four main categories: Greeting and Ordering, Quality of Product, Server Performance and Environment. We asked over 1,900 customers to list the most recent fast-casual brands they have visited and rate their experience. We then measured the top 25 brands and developed a quantifiable ranking for all the different attributes within these categories for each organization. Additionally, we measured each brand’s overall NPS® score, or how likely a customer will recommend a brand to their family and friends on a scale of 0-10.
Of the different categories we measured, the biggest difference between the top and bottom performers was Server Performance. Specifically, we asked customers to rate servers friendliness, professionalism and overall knowledge. The top brand managed an average score of 92 across the different attributes within the category, and the bottom brand scored 79. While a 79 is by no means a horrible rating, placing the score in context shows that the organization in question needs to implement a new method of training and measuring employee performance in order to match competitor performance.
The lowest margin between leader and last place was a tie between the Environment and Greeting and Ordering categories. For environment, we asked customers to rate the cleanliness, atmosphere and décor of the establishment. In the Greeting and Ordering category, we measured menu selection, wait time, ease of ordering, order accuracy and attentiveness. The leaders of the Environment and Greeting and Ordering section scored an 86 and 89 overall rating, respectively, coming in nine points higher than the lowest brand. While there is always value in striving to improve these brand attributes, the smaller discrepancy between competition in this specific category means that improvement will not have as big of an impact on your overall CX compared to working on other factors.
Conducting competitive benchmarking research like the survey we completed is an important aspect for any fast-casual brand because it helps determine an appropriate action plan in context with industry parameters. It allows brands to become more efficient and diligent within their CX improvements by offering easy-to-digest information about existing CX performance. Overall, we found that organizations with higher net ratings across the categories we measured wound up having higher NPS® scores on average. By granulizing data collection and measuring this information in context with industry competition, brands will be able to accurately develop action priorities that should have a direct impact on your overall NPS® and subsequent industry ranking.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
FAQs
How can businesses ensure their customer experience aligns with consumer expectations?
Businesses can align CX with consumer expectations by continually gathering and analyzing customer feedback, staying attuned to changing preferences, and ensuring consistency across all touchpoints.
Why is it important to align CX with expectations?
Alignment ensures higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, as consumers are more likely to engage with brands that meet or exceed their expectations.
How can businesses adjust CX to changing expectations?
By leveraging data and staying agile in response to consumer behavior.
Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.
We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.