It's the day after Christmas and do you know how your customer satisfaction is with returns?

Given all of the dire news lately regarding the success or lack there of during this holiday sales season, many retailers are having to bet their success on the out come of the post Christmas sales and how their customers satisfaction is handled during the processing of returns and exchanges.  If you are the marketing or merchandising manager for a large retailer, how are you going to gain insight in this area at such a critical time for your campaign's success, especially on a real time basis.

Sure you could be on the floor observing what is happening, but that will give you only a coverage sample of one store a day.  Not very good coverage and hard to gauge what is truly happening.  Or you could wait until the results are in a pray for the best.

However, you do have one option that you can employ and that is to establish a digital survey that is deployed using mobile devices.  Let's say after each return you ask the customer if they have a mobile device that can send text messages.  If they do, have them send a message to your short code with a special code and the survey will be delivered to them immediately.  You can ask them about the processing of the returns, the available of alternative products, the reasons for the returns, basically what ever you want.  Remember these are mobile devices so keep the survey short and don't expect a lot of textual comments.  These results can be linked to your loyalty program and your email marketing database for future segmentation, but also you can set up triggers to have predefined actions occur if certain responses are received.

Also one other line of questioning that you may want to consider is to address some of the multichannel retailing  issues.  In a research report issued by Forrester Research, Inc. early this year, they raised as a potential best practice for a multi-channel retailer to consider the use of surveys.  Here is a copy of the relevant text from the research report "Best Practices in Multichannel Retailing". 

Use surveys to gather additional insight. Many of the retailers that we spoke with use a combination of online surveys, intercept surveys, and post-sale surveys conducted online or through a toll-free number. Firms should integrate multichannel topics into these existing measurement efforts. They should ask questions like whether the customer researched the product online before coming into the store to buy it and whether they had ever bought a product from the retailer’s Web site. This customer feedback helps retailers gauge the volume of cross-channel shoppers, gain insights into the categories that matter most to these customers,
and their current satisfaction level.

As always, should you have any questions or comments regarding this post please contact me at jon@sensorpro.net.