case study Listen to the Voice of your Customer and Engage in their story. Ster Kinekor the planet s smartest cx orchestration platform

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1 Listen to the Voice of your Customer and Engage in their story. the planet s smartest cx orchestration platform Voice-of-the-Customer, Social Media and Engagement unified on the Planet s Smartest Customer Experience Software Platform. case study Ster Kinekor inquba

2 the business Ster-Kinekor theatres, the cinema division of the Ster-Kinekor entertainment business, has a total of 55 movie complexes around South Africa. 33 of these are Junction value complexes and 15 are more upmarket Classic theatres. With a total of 400 cinema screens, Ster-Kinekor is able to entertain over movie goers daily. The company provides a total of 17 million viewings per year and has 4 million unique customers. the challenge The cinema entertainment business is one built on customer experience and in an extremely competitive environment, customer experience today is more important than ever. Competitors include every type of entertainment available to consumers, such as television and pay TV, mobile and online content, gaming and many other types of leisure activities. In addition, a tight economy means that consumers are more aware now of how they spend their money and are therefore more demanding. Recognising that its business is built on the experience customers have at its cinemas, Ster-Kinekor was cognisant of the need to provide the best possible and most satisfying customer experience as that is what impacts its two key revenue drivers: repeat visits and total spend. There is competition today that did not exist a few years ago, says Nelius Greyling, chief operations officer at Ster-Kinekor Theatres. We are competing for the customer s time and their wallet. If we do not ensure that our offering is right up there among the best, we will be left behind. Customer service is a critical success factor in our business. There s another significant element. The social media platform has given customers a voice they did not have before. Where once irate cinemagoers might have written a letter to the cinema manager, today they make their dissatisfaction widely known on Twitter and Facebook. That means an unhappy 16-year-old can do serious damage to our business, says Greyling. That s why we need to know what makes our customers happy and how we can improve on the cinema experience from the moment a ticket is bought to the time the person leaves the complex. The solution has given us many unique insights into customer wants and needs 2

3 how traditional research falls short Ster-Kinekor was only able to monitor and measure customer experience with traditional measurement tools. Historically, the company made use of annual outsourced telephonic market research to measure and manage the experience it was delivering to its customers. The disadvantage of traditional market research is that much of the essence of the customer experience is lost by the time the customer is surveyed. If you ve watched a movie and someone calls you to ask you about the experience three months later, what do you actually remember about the condition of the cinema or the freshness of the popcorn? says Greyling. The answer is not much. What we needed was the ability to survey customers quickly so that they could recall their experiences honestly and accurately. That would give the management team the information they need to respond to the feedback immediately, so that by the time the customer returns to the cinema, any problems will have been addressed. There are other drawbacks to traditional research too. Not only is it an expensive process that requires many resources, but it s also not suitable for an environment like Ster-Kinekor s, where new products are released every week. That means we are reselling ourselves to customers every seven days, says Greyling. To achieve success, we need to have our finger on the pulse and to respond to customer demands a lot more rapidly. That was why Ster-Kinekor engaged customer experience management specialist inquba in October 2010 to design and implement a solution that would incorporate all the latest principles of customer experience management. The inquba team was prepared to take the time to learn about our business, says Greyling. They spent months meeting with people at the coalface and in workshops with our employees. They then developed a pilot platform for Ster-Kinekor, which they left with us for six months to test and evaluate. Because of the in-depth understanding they developed of the impact of every point of our engagement with customers, they developed the system we needed. 3

4 With inquba VoC - Voice-of-the- Customer Software as a Service solution - in place, customer data is uploaded immediately after the movie going experience, and those who choose to participate are contacted within 24 hours via /web completion or SMS/USSD Mobile completion and asked to rate their experience. At present, Ster-Kinekor is targeting its Movie Club and Vitality partner members, of which there are Survey data is collected and analysed and any negative feedback is funnelled through an escalation process which enables managers to address any issues as a matter of urgency. Permissionbased reports and insights are published and are accessible to several levels of staff, from cinema managers, to regional and national managers, to various executives. the solution Key Benefits The solution, deployed at the beginning of 2011, fulfils several customer experience management needs by: Measuring customer satisfaction, customer experience, and the competitive landscape Providing near real-time collection of data Providing feedback that is immediately available to cinema managers Enabling broad-based access to all levels of management with appropriate levels of dashboard and report access at national, regional, and cinema levels Allowing for benchmarking of performance across all metrics, cinemas, and regions shows best regional and national performance per metric Linking performance management to customer experience This information has enabled Ster- Kinekor to map the entire customer experience, break it down into components, and then down to individual complexes so that the data can be actioned immediately. The solution has given us many unique insights into customer wants and needs, says Greyling. In addition to expected factors, like the cleanliness of toilet facilities, we also discovered that the exit experience on leaving the cinema plays a key role in customer satisfaction, which is something we had not thought about before. Cross channel and cross incentive analysis A further investigation was conducted to determine the optimal combinations of incentive and channel for the best response rates, as well as to ensure that data collected across channel/ incentive permutations was statistically representative. The analysis yielded the following: Targets response rates were exceeded by 200% in nearly all channels Optimal channel and incentive combinations Proved multi-channel approach success Proved that a combination of SMS and with the correct incentives provided the most statistically relevant responses at the lowest cost Human channels showed biased results while electronic channels did not This in-depth process of capturing a customer s expectations, preferences and dislikes gives us unparalleled insight into our business, says Greyling. We can use that information to drive marketing and budget decisions with the full assurance that they ll increase revenue. By measuring the voice of the customer, we can be certain that we are designing our customer experience to meet our brand promise, which is that Ster-Kinekor cinema is a happy place for customers. 4

5 conclusion Ster-Kinekor currently receives daily feedback on the performance of its cinemas in terms of overall customer experience. Cinema managers have embraced the solution as a means to manage their outlets and improve on their customer experience measures. Around 1 million surveys were sent in a period of 10 months which amounts to between 40% and 75% of all contactable customers. A response rate of 8% was achieved, which was well ahead of initial targets. The solution has enabled managers to view information and take action to address negative customer experiences before it s too late. Benchmarking across cinemas has been made possible due to the high volumes of data and the strong statistical significance resulting from that. This allows cinema managers to measure their performance against others in their region as well as nationally, creating a highly competitive environment. Over time and through usage, Ster-Kinekor has been able to prioritise its key experience drivers and, importantly, prioritise spend on projects related to these drivers. In an environment in which budgets are tight, this is an important consideration, as companies cannot afford to spend money on nonessential initiatives that are of little significance to customers. listen learn engage story Seeing their future has never been this easy. inquba