Report: Locating A Store On The Phone Is Not Always Easy

February 22, 2011 2 Comments

We just published a new Temkin Group report, Locating A Store On The Phone Is Not Always Easy.

The report examines the experience of using phone self-service applications to find a nearby store or branch.

Here’s the executive summary:

When traveling in an unfamiliar area, calling a store’s toll-free number can be a convenient way to locate the closest branch or store location. How user-friendly are these phone-based store locators? We used Temkin Group’s SLICE-B methodology to evaluate the experiences at five large banks (Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, USBank, and Wells Fargo) and five large retailers (Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart). Target was the only store to receive an “Excellent” overall rating, with 23 out of a possible 24 points. Citibank and Walgreens, on the other hand, scored in the “Poor” range. Stores lost points for offering voice-activated search without touch-tone support and for accepting only one criteria to search by, usually a zip code.

Download report for $195

Here’s one of the figures that shows the overall results:

Download report for $195

The bottom line: What’s it like when your customers call you?

Filed under Customer Connectedness, Customer experience, Temkin Group Research Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
I'm an experience (XM) management catalyst; helping organizations improve results by engaging the hearts and minds of their employees, customers, and partners. I enjoy researching and speaking about these topics. I lead the Qualtrics XM Institute, which is the world's best job. We're igniting a global community of XM Professionals who are inspired and empowered to radically improve the human experience. To achieve this goal, my team focuses on thought leadership, training, and community building. My work is driven by a set of fundamental beliefs: 1) Everything starts and ends with human beings, so you need to understand how people think, feel, and behave; 2) XM is a discipline that needs to be woven throughout an organization's entire operating fabric; and 3) Building the XM discipline requires a combination of culture, competency, and technology.

2 Responses to Report: Locating A Store On The Phone Is Not Always Easy

  1. Belinda Ephraim says:
    April 21, 2011 at 11:37 pm

    It took me fifteen minutes to find a physical address for your business and that included scouring your site, using phone reverse lookup on Google which resulted in an old press release that contained an address with no city/state, and then taking that information and Googling further to figure out you were located in MA.

    I stumbled on your website for a research paper on service innovation and was very excited and then not-so-excited when I couldn’t find out where you are located. Hopefully, this is something that can be easily fixed on both your blog and website contact pages.

    Cheers,

    Reply
    • Bruce Temkin says:
      April 22, 2011 at 5:57 am

      Hi Belinda: Hopefully we’ve made our email address and contact forms easily accessible. Since we don’t have any “retail” presence, there hasn’t been a need to provide pur physical address; it only seems to attract sales pitches and junk mail. Since you are interested, we are in the Boston area. Let me know how we can help (bruce@temkingroup.com) and I’ll be happy to give you our address…

      Reply

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