Argos Case Study
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WWW.FORESEE.COM | CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS CASE STUDY | ARGOS CHANGE, COMPLEXITY AND THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Argos is the U.K.’s leading digital retailer, offering more than 33,000 products through its website, its growing mobile channels, its network of 740 stores, over the telephone and through Argos TV. It sells everything from furniture and electronics to clothing, jewellery, toys and more. When the company was founded more than 40 years ago, customers would look through the Argos summer or winter catalogue at home, then go to the store. In the showroom, they could view sample merchandise and order and pay for chosen products. Moments later their purchases would arrive at the collection point from the warehouse. Then the Internet arrived. “Our core differentiator—the convenient catalogue home-shopping experience—was in danger of disappearing,” says Abigail Austin, Senior Customer Research Manager for Argos. Embracing innovation, she says, “We were one of the first U.K. retailers to join the Internet space and to offer ‘ring and reserve,’ where customers reserve products online or by phone and then come to the store at their leisure to collect and pay for them.” Home delivery options soon followed. By 2012, however, competitive pressures had increased substantially and set Argos back in the eyes of the market and their customers. In an effort to revitalise the four-decade- old brand, a new managing director was brought in to transform the business quickly. He launched a highly ambitious five-year plan that would fast-track Argos’ journey to RETAILER ARGOS USES FORESEE TO Measure the Multichannel Customer Experience During Dramatic Transformation
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Transcript of Argos Case Study
WWW.FORESEE.COM | CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS
CASE STUDY | ARGOS
CHANGE, COMPLEXITY AND THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Argos is the U.K.’s leading digital retailer, offering more than 33,000 products through its website, its growing mobile channels, its network of 740 stores, over the telephone and through Argos TV. It sells everything from furniture and electronics to clothing, jewellery, toys and more.
When the company was founded more than 40 years ago, customers would look through
the Argos summer or winter catalogue at home, then go to the store. In the showroom, they could view sample merchandise and order and pay for chosen products. Moments later their purchases would arrive at the collection point from the warehouse.
Then the Internet arrived. “Our core differentiator—the convenient catalogue home-shopping experience—was in danger
of disappearing,” says Abigail Austin, Senior Customer Research Manager for Argos. Embracing innovation, she says, “We were one of the first U.K. retailers to join the Internet space and to offer ‘ring and reserve,’ where customers reserve products online or by phone and then come to the store at their leisure to collect and pay for them.” Home delivery options soon followed.
By 2012, however, competitive pressures had increased substantially and set Argos back in the eyes of the market and their customers. In an effort to revitalise the four-decade-old brand, a new managing director was brought in to transform the business quickly. He launched a highly ambitious five-year plan that would fast-track Argos’ journey to
RETAILER ARGOS USES FORESEE TO
Measure the Multichannel Customer Experience During Dramatic Transformation
WWW.FORESEE.COM | CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS
CASE STUDY | RETAILER ARGOS USES FORESEE TO MEASURE THE MULTICHANNEL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DURING DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION
the forefront of retail innovation by offering a completely digitised experience across its touch points, especially in its brick-and-mortar locations. The core of this strategy was to deliver flawless customer service and experiences across all customer interactions, as Argos works to become a true multichannel retailer, regain its market leadership and future-proof the business.
Argos knew that through the transformation, they needed a way to continually measure customer satisfaction across the entire business. “Our managing director wanted one number that would tell him how the company was performing across all customer touch points at any given time. After all, the customer sees us as one brand, even if we look at the business by department or channel,” says Austin. “Unfortunately, what we
had in place at the time was a brand-tracking survey as well as separate web, home delivery, exit and store surveys, all of which asked different questions in different ways and measured different things for different reasons.” This multichannel retailer needed a multichannel measurement system.
ONE MEASURE, MULTIPLE CHANNELS
“We chose to work with ForeSee because they could give us one customer satisfaction figure to tell us how we were doing across our entire business. And,” adds Austin, “they also could give us individual channel measures and insights to help us prioritise changes so that we could get the whole customer journey right.” Within four months, Argos was measuring 11 channels with ForeSee. Within
a year, they were measuring 14 channels and planning to implement even more to provide complete coverage of all Argos channels.
Today, more than 150 Argos managers have access to the ForeSee VOC Portal, where they can view measures, analyses and customer feedback at will. They receive top-line ForeSee customer experience data and key insights weekly via email. They know how the company is doing overall, how each channel is performing, and what the critical customer satisfaction challenges are.
Store managers receive reports that provide their overall results and help them understand priorities for improvement. The Marketing and Digital teams receive monthly reports that combine ForeSee data with brand tracking data, enabling them to review brand health in a competitive context. Individual channel teams attend periodic Satisfaction Insight Reviews (SIRs), the formal presentation and analysis of results delivered by their dedicated ForeSee CX Analyst, which helps them uncover key insights and prioritise improvements.
“With ForeSee, we achieved our one-number multichannel view, but we also gained a decision-support system that’s driven by our customers.”
ABIGAIL AUSTIN SENIOR CUSTOMER RESEARCH MANAGER ARGOS
WWW.FORESEE.COM | CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS
CASE STUDY | RETAILER ARGOS USES FORESEE TO MEASURE THE MULTICHANNEL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE DURING DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATION
CUSTOMER-DRIVEN DECISION SUPPORT
Soon after implementing ForeSee, Argos launched a number of changes to its website and saw its customer satisfaction score drop significantly. “The beauty of ForeSee is that we could go to the Digital team and tell them not only what was happening, but why it was happening— which bits had gone wrong, what the customers’ biggest concerns were,” notes Austin. “Based on the ForeSee SIRs, we now give the Digital team a set of top 10 priorities
to work on each quarter. Each service pack for implementing fixes on the site is built on the back of ForeSee.”
Austin also reports that managers are starting to use ForeSee data, in addition to financial and other types of data, in the company’s Monday morning Trading Meetings. “We never really had the voice of the customer in the room before,” says Austin. “Now, the Store Operations, Marketing and Digital teams are bringing it with them. When we’re thinking
about doing something, the discussion starts with ‘can you find out what the customer is thinking about such and such,’ and then we put the financials together.”
Concludes Austin, “With ForeSee, we achieved our one-number multichannel view, but we also gained a decision-support system that’s driven by our customers.”
“We chose to work with ForeSee because they could give us one customer satisfaction figure to tell us how we were doing across our entire multichannel business.”
ABIGAIL AUSTIN SENIOR CUSTOMER RESEARCH MANAGER ARGOS
ABOUT FORESEEFounded in 2001, ForeSee is the pioneering leader in Voice of Customer (VOC) solutions. Armed with the ForeSee CX Suite, more than 2,000 companies worldwide — in retail, government, financial services, healthcare, consumer packaged goods, and other industries — have transformed their VOC programs into a strategic and rigorous business discipline that delivers economic impact. Only ForeSee offers a multi-patented algorithmic approach to customer experience measurement, access to an unmatched 150 million benchmarked experiences, and actionable insights from a team of 200 expert analysts that give certainty to CX improvements. A subsidiary of Answers Corporation, ForeSee is headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI and has offices in Mountain View, New York, St. Louis, Cleveland, Vancouver, and London.
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