Posted: 11.05.2019

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According to a 362-firm study by Bain and Company, 80% of companies believe they offer a "superior experience," while only 8% of their customers actually agree. As experience has become the last remaining differentiator in brick-and-mortar businesses, this statistic is shocking.

For all the lip-service the terms "customer centricity" and "customer-first" get, you'd think that the critical customer experience would be soundly understood across the organization. You'd be wrong.

Sure, there are satisfaction surveys on the bottoms of receipts, online feedback chatbots and telephone message lines. But do these methods capture the dynamic, LIVE and human customer experience? Hardly. Asking repondents how they thought or felt in the past has been proven to lead to the wrong conclusions. As experience has become the last remaining differentiator in brick-and-mortar businesses, the need for non-recall market research is now acute.

For the most accurate read on in-the-moment, on-site customer experience, nothing beats face-to-face contact. There's no recall of the experience, since they are still IN the experience. There's no bias of online communities that skews towards the online respondents, which have been proven to think, behave, and buy very different than people outside of the online community. In fact, in-person data collection delivers the most reliable, sustainable insights into the customer experience. So why doesn't every company have a face-to-face customer experience-measuring department?

In a word, the issue is logistics. A $1 million dollar product or service enhancement certainly justifies the $30k to find out if it's performing as promised. But companies need the best researchers at the most local level. They need to train and manage hundreds of people, build or buy a fleet of tablet devices and software, organize store-level workers, shifts, and organize output data in a way that clearly demonstrates wether or not goals have been achieved. The budget is one thing, having a PhD in logistics, research, and analysis is quite another.

This is where Custom Intercept Solutions comes in.

How do we do it?

To achieve a statistically-valid result, you need to sample a representative group. Let's say you are a national restaurant chain. Sampling 3 stores in each of 5 representative markets (15 total stores) across the country over 2 high-traffic days will yield a sample size of approximately 2,400 completed interviews. For around $30k, this will provide a non-recalled, non-biased sample with 95% confidence, +/- 5, even when drilling down into specific personas (specific demographic/psychographic/use profiles).

Our singular focus is providing the most accurate, live market insights to our clients. We are the only provider of local US and Canadian markets at scale, which means that we solve the logistics barrier. We have over 15 years' experience across all customer-facing industries, which means we already have a good bead on where to start your interview instrument. Finally, we collect all data (qual and quant) via video-enabled, touch-friendly iPads, which means we deliver visually-stunning, same-day, on-the-ground customer insights.

Rather than asking REMOVED customers their PERCEIVED INTENT to purchase in a HYPOTHETICAL setting, we connect IN-PERSON, while they are in their experience, in the REAL WORLD, to get the REAL STORY.

Contact us to get a quote within 24 hours, and start closing the customer experience gap!