Customer Perceptions Count!
20th August 2020
The Global CEO Excellence Award 2020, Market Research, Ireland was awarded to Emma Harte of Customer Perceptions Ltd recently by Justice Minister Helen McEntee at a ‘restricted’ ceremony in the company’s offices in Dundalk.
With over 60,000 subscribers, CEO Monthly Magazine hosts Global Awards each year governed by a strict selection process supervised by the UK’s Independent Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Accreditation body. The awards acknowledge “those who possess the ability to take a business to the next level thanks to their commitment to promoting business excellence, determination and innovative approaches”
Customer Perceptions has traded for 25 years and processed over 1.5 million customer insight reports. Their 8,000+ part-time field researchers/ mystery shoppers are managed by an office-based team of 20, utilising state of the art technology and working to international quality standards. The Customer Perceptions’ client list makes for impressive reading and includes dozens of household brand and product names, high-street store and hotel chains, banks, airports, cinemas & theatres, businesses selling online and even Government bodies who are now keen to monitor the quality of their customer care and service.
Asked about the business, Emma says, “For many of our clients, the information we provide can be vital, usually feeding directly into staff training programmes and the organisation’s strategic planning. And correctly so, as research shows that 68% of customers leave, never to return, because of staff behaviour & attitudes while some 97% of unhappy customers leave without complaint”.
However, Emma’s ‘Global CEO Excellence Award’ is based on the Company’s new, smartphone, customer feedback technology developed over recent years. Their own research showed that clients would soon demand complimentary, real-time, technology based and cost-effective customer feedback and so “TellUsFirst™” was conceived. Two years of inhouse development and extensive testing followed, involving a multiplicity of sectors and sizes of organisations in several markets and the service was launched, marking an exciting start to the Company’s third decade in business. The CEO Monthly citation acknowledges Emma “using the very solid foundations in the traditional Mystery Shopping business to evolve the business model and develop technology with scalable opportunities”.
Emma says that “end user customers can be very forgiving of a poor experience if their complaint is addressed quickly and properly. On the other hand, with today’s social media, they can now tell hundreds, perhaps even thousands of their dissatisfaction in a very short time” In this light, the TellUSFirst™ service provides the client store or organisation with real-time, highly cost effective, 24/7 understanding of: (i) the likelihood of a customer returning and recommending the business to others [Net Promoter Score or NPS] and (ii) if their feedback is negative, WHY???
