Frozen food retailer Iceland has embraced social media as part of its new ‘My Iceland’ marketing campaign to generate customer feedback about their in-store experiences.
In a bid to improve the customer experience, Iceland is encouraging shoppers, via till receipts and in-store PoS, to complete an online survey. This rates their experience on a scale of one to five, on factors such as staff friendliness and store cleanliness.
To coincide with the campaign, Iceland has introduced a social media advocacy tool ‘GoRecommend’, which sources customer comments on their Iceland experience and products purchased, using social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
The programme is developed with customer experience management firm Empathica, was launched in May.
According to Iceland, in the first week alone, it has been able to amplify positive and personal customer comments to over 200,000 Facebook users, which has resulted in an uplift in traffic to Iceland.co.uk.
“We wanted to send a clear message to our customers we’re here to listen to their feedback and exceed expectations when it comes to their Iceland experience,” said Iceland’s retail operations manager Steve Pennington.
“The thinking behind the new programme came from wanting our customers to feel Iceland is at the heart of their community and we welcome their feedback to help us improve. It’s about moving past static measures of performance to a more dynamic, fluid strategy that gauges how real customers interact with and perceive our business.”
Laura Ellis, trading operations manager at Iceland, said: “All the supermarkets are slashing their prices to encourage shoppers to shop with them. We already offer excellent value for money, and want to show our customers they can get great value and excellent service every day at Iceland – that’s our point of difference.”
Running alongside its current mystery shopping initiative, the new programme assesses the customer experience in Iceland stores, as well as its delivery service, and feeds the data back to location managers.
Pennington said: “The new programme has also proven to be hugely motivating and empowering for our employees, as it allows customers to identify where they have received exceptional service and feedback to individual members of our team. The Empathica system generates a customer WOW and flags up the comment to the store manager, which has helped massively with getting buy in from our store teams – the programme has quickly become part of the Iceland DNA.”
Gary Topiol, EMEA managing director for Empathica, said: “We’re delighted to have successfully demonstrated how quickly a well executed CEM programme can deliver team engagement and actionable insights.The philosophy behind My Iceland is very inspirational and I am certain the programme will enable Iceland to strengthen the community feeling and drive long term customer loyalty.”