FreshNetworks Blog

‘Multichannel’ has become a ubiquitous term in retailing and there are sound business reasons for adopting an integrated multichannel strategy.

Not only does multichannel tie together the consumer’s off and online experience, but with real advantages like “click and collect”,(which allows the customer to check if a product is in stock, order it and receive it the same day before even leaving the house) multichannel can help bricks and mortar businesses improve how cost effective they are in terms of e-fulfilment, home delivery, returns etc.

So it comes as no suprise that Multichannel leader John Lewis has introduced wifi to their stores, making it easier for shoppers to price check and compare in-store.

And as social media is woven into the multichannel experience, the buying habits of ‘others like us’ is influencing consumer decision making. So it’s often the case that the savvy multichannel consumer is as knowledgeable as the store assistant, not just on comparable offers, but also the features, functionality and suitability of products on sale. US retailer Sears has combated this by equipping their staff with iPads to help their assistants meet the expectations of their product-aware customers.

Often held up as a pioneer of social commerce, Polyvore has been extremely successful in building a business based on creating an outfit or ‘look’ for others to purchase. This concept, until now,  has been for e-businesses only but  bricks and mortar retailers could use the concept to give a physical shopper access to choose from an expanded stock line, as well as helping the consumer match items they purchased in person to other items online.

Bricks and mortar shopping centre owner Westfield has actually taken this concept on board by developing a virtual mall. Westfield’s virtual mall gives online shoppers the experience of shopping in-store in an online environment. For instance, where you might buy several matching items from different retailers in a trip to a shopping centre or High Street, Westfield’s virtual mall allows you to look at and compare the goods of several retailers in an integrated, ecommerce shopping experience.

Retailers who ignore multichannel do so at their own peril as it is clearly a way to allow the  traditional bricks and mortar retailer to bring their customers the best of both the on and offline worlds.

Image courtesy of Ag Knowlogy

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix.

NPS is calculated by asking customers a single question, eg,”How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” and asking them to rate their answer between 1-10, where 10 is “extremely likely” and 0 is “not at all likely”.

Based on their response, customers are categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9–10 rating), Passives (7–8 rating), and Detractors (0–6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter Score.

Here are a few ways in which social media could potentially improve your Net Promoter Score:

1. Customer Service

The obvious option – use social media channels as an additional opportunity to assist customers and thus increase satisfaction. Twitter is a “quick win” as a social media customer service channel and it should be manned, monitored and used by dedicated members of your customer service team.

2. Expectation management

Improve your chances of delivering against expectations by acquiring the ‘right’ customers and ensuring they are completely aware about what your product or services can do for them. Encouraging more and better (e.g. video) reviews will help this. For example, if you’re an e-commerce business you could help reduce the number of (costly) returned orders thanks to the better expectation setting that comes from unadulterated customer reviews.

3. Insight

NPS should not be just about the number; understanding what turns off detractors and what makes promoters rave about you is where the real value lies. Both social media monitoring and market research online communities (MROCs) can be useful for diving deeper into your perceived strengths and what you need to improve on. The more you can encourage feedback through an ongoing, two-way conversation, the better understanding you will have about how customers perceive your business and what you need to change.

4. Enhanced connection with an organisation

Social media gives customers an opportunity to feel directly connected to the heart of the business. With this in mind, you could consider running a closed community of promoters, with a high NPS,  for your brand. This gives advocates the chance to hang out with other advocates and like-minded people in their own space. As a result, they’ll feel like insiders and could increase enthusiasm for your brand as well as potentially seeing an increase in their aggregate NPS score too.

5. Convert detractors into promoters

Use social media monitoring to pick out detractors and work to improve their perception of your brand. Develop a proper social media management plan to focus on this specific group and tailor procedures and content to help turn them from detractors into passives or promoters.

Whilst some big retailers are still sitting on the sidelines considering whether social media has a role in their business, one of our biggest retailers has acquired its own social media company.

Yesterday it was announced that Tesco has bought US word-of-mouth social media company BzzAgent for a reported $60 million.

Bzzagent, a Boston based start up, uses volunteers to sample FMCG products and then encourages them to describe these products through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The company has 800,000 volunteers, working across brands like Unilever and L’Oreal, who spend their time describing their product experience online.

By purchasing BzzAgent, Tesco clearly want to better connect social media with product marketing. With access to some on the most comprehensive consumer data collected from their loyalty card holders, the extra content and data gathered from Bzzagent can only serve to enrich this further.

Tesco clearly recognise the significance of social media in influencing buyer behaviour. None of the other major retailers has gone this far in using social media – most seem to be focusing their efforts on communities that already hold great influence, like Mumsnet, NetMums and the hugely popular Money Saving Expert.

Tesco’s move to buy BzzAgent is another example of how social media is becoming a mainstream staple in the retailer marketing mix and the opportunity it represents can no longer be ignored.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how brands  are getting preoccupied with generating high numbers of Facebook ‘Likes’ rather than building deep engagement and this got me thinking -  if “Likes” are going to be used as  measure of engagement should they have an expiration date?

Why don’t fans of a brand have to reassert their allegiance to a particular brand from time to time?

For example, what if I “Liked” a brand last year because of some clever campaign but actually now also “Like” their rival brand, is the original brand still counting me as a fan of their product? And if I were able to renew my “Like” would I be more engaged with a brand than someone who has “Liked” a brand or product just the once?

Of course, this would put marketing teams under even more pressure to be innovative and creative in their use of campaigns and Facebook engagement. But surely this is what they need to do anyway to ensure people keep buying their products.

So how long should the “Like” last for? A month? 3 months? A year? It would be good to hear your comments and views about this.

When it comes to Facebook, marketers often think that hitting 10,000, 50,000 or more than 1 million likes is the only metric for measuring the success of a Facebook page.

Perhaps this is because the “like” button is a metric that’s comparable to traditional mass media metrics. Magazines and papers sell advertising rates based on their circulation volume and TV companies still sell a 30 second ad spot related to viewing figures (the more viewers, the  higher the cost of the spot).

So ROI from social media, particularly Facebook, is easy to get your head around if you think of it in this mass media context.

Except it isn’t as simple as this.

While there’s nothing wrong with measuring the number of Facebook likes, social media is about more than just getting mass market attention; it should be used to build real engagement. Marketers need to stop focusing on volume and “likes” and should start looking at the quality or influence levels of the people they are interacting with.

Look at these Facebook pages for Pepto Bismol or Red Bull – each uses a somewhat awkward arrow to point out the like button (as if the average Facebook user doesn’t know where the like button is). Very little thought has gone in to what to do with these people once they have “liked” the page or whether the likes represent any sort of positive influence with the brand.

Marketers need to remember that when it comes to social media, numbers alone do not equal engagement  – only activity equals engagement. So perhaps what should be measured is an action demonstrating engagement, such as quality of feedback per post or number of comments posted.

Influence comes from connecting to those individuals who make up your target audience, and over time, developing and nurturing that relationship. Marketers should worry less about how many people they are connected to and should start thinking more about who they are connected to and how their brand can positively add value to that individual’s life.