Methodology
Compare and Contrast the emerging concepts and practice that underpin the Customer Experience.
Woolworth Company is one of leading Retail Corporation, which was developed in New South Wales, Australia. This corporation was founded in the year of 1924. Woolworths has captured about 80% retail area in the nation of Australia. After 1924, preference of customers is boosting and the high amount of subsidiaries is initiated in the nation of Australia. Woolworths has captured American supermarket giant Safeway in 1985. In the year of 2017, Woolworths has applied the green apple logo (Woolworths group, 2017).
With the intention of this investigation, both primary and secondary facts and figures were gathered in the form of quantitative with qualitative facts and figures.
For collecting the primary data, 5 customer interviews were conducted. For this interview, an open questionnaire was used to obtain the depth facts and figures regarding the research issue. These interviews were conducted with persons and were documented by recording. It aids to ensure the reliable outcome. Each respondent remains as unidentified to keep the confidentiality and outcome were recorded and assessed as per the need of persona (Schmitt, 2016).
The investigation was gathered by applying the questionnaire. It was intended to obtain both quantitative and qualitative results with an integration of open and close-ended questions. The survey was conducted on 55 participants who were selected as per their convenience and the Google form technique is implemented for conducting this questionnaire. All respondents have been documented as unidentified to make sure the confidentiality and outcome have been documented and accessed via 2 customer personas (Homburg, Jozi?, and Kuehnl, 2017).
Secondary data: Secondary data was gathered to support the outcome of the investigation. It involves desktop investigation such as journal articles, online sources, textbooks, competitor’s websites and company websites (Peppers, and Rogers, 2016).
Outcome via collection of data from survey through questionnaire
|
Persona |
Demographic |
Behaviors and actions |
Needs |
Pain Points |
|
Millennial |
16-35 years of consumers who live in Australia Experience: 2-5 years of experience to buy the products of Woolworths |
· Frequently purchase the products · Products can be purchased via online and offline channels · Prompt to change · Sometimes, products have certain defects and need to change it |
· Needs organic products that provide healthy life. · Needs fresh and quality food products and efficient services · Needs member rewards and some extra remuneration for being loyal |
· Premium price · Delay customer services |
|
Family customers |
35-55 years of consumers who live in Australia Experience: more than 5 years of experience to buy the products of Woolworths |
· Provides a discount to loyal customers on products and services · Product information can be accessed through company websites · Availability of online and offline sources to purchase the products and services · 24*7 hours services on online channels |
· Needs Attractive packaging such as detail of product’s ingredient, and price · Need availability of mobile App for ordering products and services |
· when the range of product is small · When the quality of the product is bad · When delay in customer services |
Journey map
|
Customer Journey |
Awareness |
Research and evaluation |
Purchase |
Member Rewards |
Offline retail store |
Online retail services |
||
|
Division Accountable |
Marketing |
Marketing |
Sales and Service department |
Marketing and Service |
Services department |
Services department |
||
|
Touch Points |
· Advertising • Social |
Website Searching online Comparison of sites Travel agent |
Online purchasing via websites or affiliate sites |
Promotion, advertising and payment |
· In offline retail stores, number of salespeople · Security · Sales announcement |
· Range of products · Sales Discount · Quality of products and services |
||
|
Millennial |
Customer Feelings |
Good |
||||||
|
BAD |
||||||||
|
Brand and Value perception |
Believes they advertise low rate product and services as well as deliver on the promise |
Researches and product’s order is based on the value as well as the quality of products and services Believes Woolworths is not truthful in terms of their pricing and so make it rigid to compare the products and services |
Online purchase does not like paying for extras such as delivery charges and product’s range |
Member rewards do not compare to other competitors such as Wesfarmers. |
Not adequate communication with a customer about delays can lead to canceling the product’s order (see appendix b). |
Need to enhance the food quality and prompt services Needs to offer affordable price (see appendix A). |
||
|
Family customers |
Customer Feelings |
Good |
||||||
|
BAD |
||||||||
|
Brand and Value perception |
Believes they advertise high-quality products and deliver on the promise |
Researches and evaluation relies on product’s quality reliability and timing It also believes Woolworths does not offer organic product and mobile app services (see appendix B). |
Purchase online when necessary at the last moment Online service can beneficial to access the availability of product and its price |
Ordering products member rewards do not compare to other companies such as Wesfarmers |
Need Assurance and do not like when faced with delays (see appendix A). |
Need to Enhance the product’s quality and rapid services (see appendix A). |
Analysis of Competitor
|
Customer Experience Concern 1 Price (what is involved in the price and what is additional) |
Customer Experience Concern 2 Delays |
|
|
Woolworths |
After products are chosen as per the price, customers are taken to collection of page that demonstrates option for add-ons. (Lemon, and Verhoef, 2016). Business class involves carry on and nothing else (Marchesani, Piccoli, and Lui, 2017). Retailers must pay $50 extra if they wish to get services before expected time or within 1 day. Customer faces issue in terms of refundable items and applicable sales coupon discount (Holland, and Ramanathan, 2016). |
When a product is canceled and replaced by customers then, Woolworths will SMS, phone, and email with changes and additional options without taking any charge (Grønholdt, Martensen, Jørgensen, and Jensen, 2015). In their retail stores, the company should provide space, water, and air conditioner environment with sound music and parking facilities. Lack of these services creates an issue for the customer to purchase from Woolworths (McColl-Kennedy, Gustafsson, Jaakkola, Klaus, Radnor, Perks, and Friman, 2015). |
|
Wesfarmers |
Wesfarmers provides the business loyalty cards, e-deal services, and reward points. E-deal is the cheapest alternative that is nearest to Woolworth’s membership services (Benzarti, and Mili, 2017). |
Wesfarmers use the online function in which customers can check the product’s status and availability of products to make sure that they are aware of the product’s specifications (Seligman, 2019). |
Woolworths advertise and promote their brand as premium quality. According to the data analysis, it is demonstrated that each customer persona follows through on the promise. Result also shows that sometimes customer prefers to buy products from competitors of Woolworths such as Wesfarmers due to ‘delay service’ and ‘value for money’. It can happen in the case of a lack of understanding regarding the customer-centric approach at the workplace. According to Kandampully (2014), a company can get the best chance to succeed and retain the customers by delivering the added customer value and maintaining the outstanding liaison with customers.
Primary data
When assessing the touch points of Woolworths in the customer journey map, the overall customer is satisfied with online ordering and assessing the techniques provided by Woolworths and related websites (see Appendix A). When consumers are researching and evaluating Woolworths against their key market players, then they are facing certain pain points. On the basis of the result, customers get frustrated that Woolworths do not pay an extra charge on the overall display online price and that appears cheaper as compared to its key market players. As per the view of Joshi (2014), it is very complex for the company to maintain the relationship with customers as the ultimate need of successful customer liaison is trust.
According to Blázquez (2014), the main aspect of providing the effective customer experience is to assure what they expect and provides exactly as assured. It is also known as DRIFT. As per the result of customer experience, consumers find they get underwhelmed services in both online and offline channels and faced issue regarding delay services.
Ren Qiu Wang and Lin (2016) illustrated that there are three main elements of brand experience such as experiential communication, look and feel, and experience from product. After assessing functional attributes of products and services that are offered by Woolworths, it is identified that offering products and service is a basic function but there is need to provide the quality, attractive packaging and develops positive brand experience.
It is stated that in the current phenomenon, Although, Woolworths is not behind the competition, and also not behind the technology but, it is behind their consumers. As per the view of Khan Akram Shah and Khan (2018), Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) is when a consumer researches regarding products and services of company and bases of making purchasing decision such as on behalf of customer’s review of the products and services. It can be rating on the websites, from video or media, and from friends on the social media. It is assessed that buying decision journey has changed hence it is vital for the company to use the ZMOT model in the approaches of marketing. ZMOT model can be practiced as a perception regarding satisfaction among customers on a concurrent basis. Woolworths should practice this model to improve the customer’s insight by interacting with the customers and makes an enhancement in their product and service quality.
All of the above results depicts Woolworths should understand and assesses their need of customers for providing the organic food products and other services such as hygienic management of food and prompt customer services, member rewards, specification to change, and price. It should also prepare the VOC program to enhance the value and loyalty of customers to distinguish themselves from key market players in terms of offering the goods and services (Wu, Yeh, and Woodside, 2014).
Secondary data
References
Benzarti, I., & Mili, H. (2017, November). A Development Framework for Customer Experience Management Applications: Principles and Case Study. In e-Business Engineering (ICEBE), 2017 IEEE 14th International Conference on (pp. 118-125). IEEE.
Blázquez, M. (2014). Fashion shopping in multichannel retail: The role of technology in enhancing the customer experience. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 18(4), 97-116.
Grønholdt, L., Martensen, A., Jørgensen, S., & Jensen, P. (2015). Customer experience management and business performance. International journal of quality and service sciences, 7(1), 90-106.
Holland, H., & Ramanathan, N. (2016). Customer Experience Management. In Dialogmarketing Perspektiven 2015/2016 (pp. 83-101). USA: Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden.
Homburg, C., Jozi?, D., & Kuehnl, C. (2017). Customer experience management: toward implementing an evolving marketing concept. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45(3), 377-401.
Joshi, S. (2014). Customer experience management: An exploratory study on the parameters affecting customer experience for cellular mobile services of a telecom company. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 133, 392-399.
Kandampully, J. (2014). Customer experience management: Enhancing experience and value through service management. UK: Kendall Hunt.
Khan, N., Akram, M. U., Shah, A., & Khan, S. A. (2018, May). Calculating customer experience management index for telecommunication service using a genetic algorithm based on weighted attributes. In Innovative Research and Development (ICIRD), 2018 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Lemon, K. N., & Verhoef, P. C. (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 69-96.
Marchesani, D., Piccoli, G., & Lui, T. W. (2017). The Impact of IT-Enabled Customer Experience Management on Service Perceptions and Performance. In Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017 (pp. 377-386). USA: Springer, Cham.
McColl-Kennedy, J. R., Gustafsson, A., Jaakkola, E., Klaus, P., Radnor, Z. J., Perks, H., & Friman, M. (2015). Fresh perspectives on customer experience. Journal of Services Marketing, 29(6/7), 430-435.
Peppers, D., & Rogers, M. (2016). Managing customer experience and relationships: A strategic framework. USA: John Wiley & Sons.
Ren, L., Qiu, H., Wang, P., & Lin, P. M. (2016). Exploring customer experience with budget hotels: Dimensionality and satisfaction. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 52, 13-23.
Schmitt, B. (2016). Customer experience management. Handbuch Sozialtechniken der Kommunikation: Grundlagen–Innovative Ansätze–Praktische Umsetzungen, 1-13.
Seligman, J. (2019). Customer Experience Management: Service Design and Delivery. UK: Routledge.
Woolworths group (2017). About us. Retrieved from: https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/about-us
Wu, P. L., Yeh, S. S., & Woodside, A. G. (2014). Applying complexity theory to deepen service-dominant logic: Configural analysis of customer experience-and-outcome assessments of professional services for personal transformations. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), 1647-1670
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