With retail stores filing for bankruptcy and closing left and right (Barney’s, Forever 21, Toys R Us, Sears, etc.), it’s evident that retail shopping is going through a change: the so-called “retail apocalypse.”

It’s also fair to say that a mix of factors — the rise of ecommerce plus the increased operational costs of leasing land for a traditional brick-and-mortar store — have a lot to do with it.

A recent Walker ecommerce study reveals that by 2020, customer experience will emerge as a leading ecommerce brand differentiator.

Brands will have to differentiate themselves not based on price and product (as they have in the past), but rather on the experience that they provide to customers in both their physical and online retail stores.

Historically, the backbone of retail has been predicated around selling goods from a physical location. In the pre-internet days, department, warehouse, discount, big box, and mom-and-pop stores were where consumers would purchase goods for personal use.

Retail customer experience was predicated around these physical elements and touchpoints: Are the employees helpful? Does the store carry the products customers are looking for? Does their return policy make it easy for customers to easily exchange the product if it doesn’t match expectations?

Delighted Kiosk, our newest survey experience, collects point-of-service customer feedback at physical retail locations in real-time. Like the rest of Delighted’s customer experience products, Kiosk features simple setup and easily syncs with your existing Delighted account and dashboard, so all of your customer feedback is in one place.

The value of a strong Net Promoter Score (NPS) is that it can indicate if your business is delivering on the promises that it’s making to customers. While there are many reasons and methods to measure customer experience (CX), keeping tabs on the perception of your customers via the Net Promoter methodology can be incredibly valuable for benchmarking the health of your business. For instance, high NPS scores positively correlate to customer retention, referral acquisition, and strong brand awareness.

When you talk about measuring customer experience and satisfaction, three metrics inevitably come up as THE ones to use: Net Promoter Score (NPS) vs Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) vs Customer Effort Score (CES).

So, which is best for you?

While NPS, CSAT, and CES all garner feedback about how a customer feels about your company, products, and services, there are nuances that make one better than the other depending on your use case and business goals.

So, what is a good Net Promoter Score? The short answer is: it depends. There are 2 methodologies that explore what a good NPS score is. The first examines the strength of your NPS score regardless of industry. The second method determines what a good NPS score is with respect to your industry.

We’ll explore both methods below, but first, let’s take a quick look at how an NPS score is calculated.

Who doesn’t want to grow their business? Growth marketing is a set of activities intended to acquire more customers, increase revenue, and speak to new audiences and prospects. Many growth marketers focus on tools and strategies designed to bring customers through doors and onto websites.

Only a few, however, realize that an integral part of sustaining growth is avoiding the churn of existing customers. Many organizations understand that customer experience (CX) is important for retention and brand affinity. But, when it comes to investing in tools and services to do this, many businesses fail to see the long-term ROI that CX technology and strategy can deliver — even though the evidence is apparent:

What if we told you that there’s a way to grow your business by two to four times without developing a new product or receiving additional funding?

Exceptional customer service turns repeat and new customers into promoters. And these promoters have the potential to grow the lifetime value (LTV) of your brand by 1400%.

Historically, the concept of “customer experience” has been seen as purely the responsibility of customer support. Today, this couldn’t be more inaccurate.

In the past, customer experience was whether or not the support rep on the phone or the attendant managing department store returns — or any other gatekeeper of company protocol — could help you amend a product related issue. “Customer experience” was strictly customer service-driven and incredibly retroactive — something that was only monitored or addressed post purchase.

Who doesn’t want to grow? Growth marketing is a set of activities intended to acquire more customers, increase revenue, and speak to a previously unreachable audience. Many growth marketers focus on tools and strategies designed to bring customers through doors and onto websites.

Only a few, however, realize that an integral part of sustaining growth is avoiding the churn of existing customers. In fact, it costs 6 times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an old one.

All businesses rely on customer loyalty for brand recognition and revenue growth. How often they come back to purchase products and services, how dedicated they are to your brand, and whether they are happy with the customer service or not matters to the success of your company. Voice of the Customer, or VoC, identifies how well your business and employees know your customers and determines if you are successfully addressing their needs and expectations.

It’s well-known that a customer’s experience with a brand is a major part of what makes or breaks a relationship. In an American Express survey, one in three respondents said that they would not return to a business again after a single bad experience.

Because of this, more and more brands are leveraging data to find out what their customers are experiencing, and how to improve.

Delivering great customer experiences results in stronger brand loyalty and can truly set your company apart from the competition. The challenge is in doing so consistently and seamlessly across your organization.

An effective customer experience program can help with just that.

With the number of customer experience consultants and enterprise software vendors out there preaching complete organizational transformation (and requiring extensive budgets), it can be easy to believe that launching a customer experience program is a giant undertaking.

The fast rise of digital channels where consumers can engage with or talk about your brand has created loads of challenges.

71% of consumers want a consistent experience across all channels, but only 29% say they actually get it.

Consumers will leave your business altogether if they aren’t getting a personalized experience across channels. 33% of consumers who ended their relationship with a company in 2018 did so because the experience wasn’t personalized enough.