CX Tribe is the best Customer Experience insights, case studies and statistics. Human curated. Delivered weekly. Join more than 5,000 other CX Professionals and subscribe.
“I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.”
Benjamin Franklin
That seems to embody the very essence of the quality improvement process.
[Service Delivery]
QR Codes: a Newly Viable Service Channel
In most of the world, QR codes are a great idea … that never really took off … until now.
Here in Australia, marketers flirted with adding QR Codes to print ads and billboards a few years ago but, due to low user adoption, the practice faded away.
But then COVID hit and the demand for contactless approaches took off. With most of the world now having high mobile phone usage rates, QR codes were a natural fit.
Again, here in Australia, QR codes became the default method by which customers registered their attendance at a business to facilitate contact tracing. Now every Australian, no matter their age or technological ability knows how to scan a QR code.
That’s not the half of it. The Hustle newsletter reports that:
- 50% of all full-service restaurants in the US have added QR code menus
- PayPal has added QR code payments to ~1m small businesses
- CVS, a large US pharmacy chain, added QR code payments at 8.2k locations in the US
COVID-19 has thrown up some strange, impossible to predict, changes in society. The resurgence of QR Codes is just one.
If you’re not using QR codes in your service delivery process – maybe it’s time to reconsider.
[CX Organisational Design]
McDonald’s launches customer experience team [Link]
I find this fascinating. McDonalds, known the world over for its dedication to standardisation and consistent customer experience, is only now creating a centralised customer experience team.
They’ve lasted 66 years and achieved global consistency without a centralised structure.
Personally, I think there are good reasons to keep the CX team distributed throughout the organisation and not create a centralised group.
With a centralised group it’s easy for the rest of the organisation to become complacent with CX seen as the CX team’s job.
On the other hand, it’s easier to get projects moving if there are centralised and dedicated resources.
I suspect the very best approach is a central resource of coaches that help the operational groups to improve their processes.
[Referral Programs]
Are Customers Acquired From Referral Reward Programs Actually More Loyal?
Yes – it turns out that they are.
Other studies have shown that Referral Reward Program (RRP) acquired customers are more valuable to firms than non-RRP-acquired customers in terms of customer retention, referrals, and profit margins.
But this recent research goes on to show that RRP sourced customers are different in several other important ways:
- Satisfied RRP acquired customers are more loyal;
- Perceived switching costs have a lower impact on loyalty for RRP sourced customers; and
- RRP sourced customers cross-buy more, spend more and recommend more than other customers.
The research uses transaction data and so, in my mind, has a higher validity than studies that report respondent’s opinion on loyalty and retention intention.
These results imply that rather than a way to simply lower the cost of customer acquisition, it may be economic to run an RRP even if the cost of acquisition is higher than other approaches. A counterintuitive finding.
