News and Media
Broadgate Boosts Footfall with Visitor Experience Programme
Broadgate, the 32 acre central London neighbourhood, has increased footfall by 3 per cent to some 64,000 visits per day, with help from data sourced through ReactCX mystery shopping, to further improve visitor experience. Broadgate is the largest pedestrianised...
Brexit: Is your CX Retail Strategy Ready?
Do you know how your customers will react to Brexit and your business will be affected? Is your post-Brexit customer experience plan ready to go? It’s not necessarily all gloom and doom. In fact, Brexit could put UK shoppers off buying from abroad over the internet,...
Shopping & Leisure Estate ‘Knowledge is Power’
ReactCX designed a mystery shopping CX programme to measure the customer experience against agreed criteria and standards; GAP analysis of CX performance and delivery against targets; and then design of customer service and sales training programmes to promote optimal...
What Customers Really Want: iwoca Article
What Customers Really Want: iwoca Article To find out what’s important to customers, iwoca asked Jill Spencer, the president of Mystery Shopping Professionals Association (MSPA) in Europe/Africa, and chair of its Global Advisory Board, to outline the lessons learned...
React CX in the European Elite
The MSPA (Mystery Shopper Professionals Association) has awarded Elite Membership for the fourth consecutive year to React CX, the customer experience specialist. With over 450 members worldwide, the award by MSPA is to members who actively contribute towards...
Year of the Customer: Ten Must-Do Resolutions to Get (and Keep) Customers
With 23,000 shops expected to close in 2019, according to research by real estate advisers Altus Group, positive customer experience is essential to entice shoppers instore and away from online shopping. Here’s the thing: when making a purchase, 64 percent of people...
Man vs Machine: Customer Experience 2017
In ever tougher market conditions, how can you be sure you can deliver a great service to customers, to keep them coming back more often and spending more? Many of the major retail and leisure companies I speak to think the answer has to be a technology-based solution...
How to Improve the Customer Experience: Research Findings
I wanted to share with you the experience of 10,000 hours of mystery shopping activity so far this year. That’s the time React’s mystery shoppers have spent visiting shops, clubs, cinemas and other entertainment venues. Feeding back to me and our clients what works...
Your Holiday has been Cancelled
That feeling of being let down is rarely forgotten by you, me or any other consumer. Whether it’s a delayed flight, lost hotel booking, or a bad restaurant experience. This is peak time for the leisure sector as people take advantage of holidays and hot (we hope)...
The Value of Hello: £5.50
A new survey of 2.1m customer interactions worldwide shows 79% received a smile from staff, 81% were greeted, while only 58% received an add-on sale suggestion last year. In the UK, 73% of customers received a smile, 75% a greeting and only 47% a sale suggestion. The...
How to Save the High Street
Can the relentless downward trend in retail footfall be slowed or even stopped, as shoppers choose to shop online instead? Probably not: but individual retailers can still beat the trend. Here’s how: by providing a quality of customer experience that offers a level of...
The CX Battle Has Started: Are you Ready?
Customer Experience is now the key battleground for consumers’ purses and wallets – 89% of companies surveyed by leading analyst Gartner this year say that CX will be their primary basis for competitive differentiation. So how can organisations like yours find that...
Christmas Brand Campaigns let down by Customer Service
The UK retail sector is investing £5.6 billion on advertising this Christmas, according to the Advertising Association and Warc Data, so retailers must ensure that the in-store customer experience lives up to the brand promise. “Retail staff fail to meet the...
The Experience Economy: How to get Real Value from Mystery Shopping
Is mystery shopping still relevant for your CX measurement and improvement programme in 2017? The evidence is it can be transformative for customer experience and the bottom-line for retail, entertainment and membership organisations in particular, and I’ll explain...
UK Tops the ‘Smile’ Ranking for Customer Experience
For the first time in 14 years, the UK has topped the international Smile rankings scoring 94%, just ahead of Greece, Puerto Rico and Russia with 93%. The Smile report provides a summary of more than 1 million answers by customers to questions on B2C sales...
The High Street is Dead, Long Live the High Street
Can the relentless downward trend in retail footfall be slowed or even stopped, as shoppers choose to shop online instead? The number of people out shopping in the UK in November dropped to its lowest level since the 2008 recession, retail research says. Footfall at...
MSPA EU/Africa elects Jill Spencer as President
Ref: ReactCX MSPA President The MSPA, Mystery Shoppers Professionals Association, has appointed Jill Spencer as President. She is a Director of ReactCX, a leading UK customer experience research specialist. The MSPA is the international association for the mystery...
Less Engaged Employees Damage Sales
The latest results of the Net Happiness Score survey of the MSPA (Mystery Shopping Professionals Association) Europe of 43,775 stores show a decline in the quality of employee engagement, with an average score of 31%, compared to 34% last quarter. The UK continues to...
2019: The Year of the Customer
This year, the customer is in the driving seat; more empowered than ever before - ready and willing to vote with their feet and their fingertips to determine the success or failure of our traditional high street brands. The 2019 customer is savvy. They are using...
Christmas Brand Campaigns let down by poor Customer Service
The UK retail sector is investing more than £6 billion on advertising this Christmas, according to the Advertising Association and Warc Data, so it's critical that retailers ensure that the in-store customer experience lives up to the brand promise. “Retail staff fail...
Mystery Shopping: Mind Games Part 1
Mystery shopping is unique. It’s the only technique in the CX toolbox that can objectively measure the end-to-end customer experience. Whilst customers can feed back based on sentiment, they don’t have the trained eye to provide that micro view that shoppers look for....
The value of Mystery Shopping in the Big Data age
As technology continues to develop at a rapid pace, an ever-growing number of customer feedback opportunities are within reach of the majority of businesses. In the age of Big Data, it’s become common-place for businesses to glean real-time information about the...
Jill Spencer – MSPA Europe conference 24-26 May 2016
"The Economy of Credibility – The link between Trust and Profit" -During this session, Jill will examine the importance of credibility - to the Mystery Shopping industry as a whole, and at individual business level. She will discuss the issues that we face, and...
React joins the Elite…
The MSPA (Mystery Shoppers Professionals Association) has awarded Elite Membership to React, a leading customer service research specialist. The award has particular significance for UK retailers, entertainment venues and other users of mystery shopping services: this...
The Children’s Society boosts Gift Aid funding with Mystery Shopping
The Children’s Society has improved compliance with the Gift Aid scheme by its 97 stores to further increase its £8 million annual revenue to fund support services that help vulnerable children in England and Wales. The charity appointed React in 2014 to assess each...
Brexit: What will happen to Customer Spending?
Shoppers seem determined to spend at any price. They put £20 million a day on credit cards. We’ve seen the fastest rate of increase in borrowing for 11 years, at 9.3%. Brexiteers point to a bounce back in (ONS) sales figures: after poor results in December and...
Mystery Shopping for Profit at Polarn O. Pyret
Mystery shoppers can directly contribute to better customer service levels resulting in increased sales, says Polarn O. Pyret. The Swedish retailer of babies and children’s clothing uses the services of customer experience specialists React CX to develop and support...
2017: Customer Experience Critical to Retail Success
Will consumers in 2017 continue to move their spending from products to experiences? Retail Week reports a Visa survey that shows spending at hotels, restaurants, bars and pubs rose by 6.9% in 2016, with recreation and culture spending up by 6.5%. This growth exceeded...
Mystery Diners support Morrisons Supermarket Café Experience
Morrisons supermarkets have commissioned React CX for a series of independent reviews to assess its 399 in-store cafés, to support the standards of customer service which helped it win the 2015 UK Quality Food and Drink Awards. The survey and reporting process has...
Surveys give Cineworld Cinemas the Big Picture on Customer Service
‘Mystery shopping’ and on-line surveys for mobile devices – which generate over 400 responses from customers daily – have helped Cineworld Cinemas’ expansion programme, with the number of cinemas increasing to 82 from 71 when the programme started in 2005. Cineworld...
Mystery Shoppers go Undercover at Heathrow Airport
Caterer Eurest Aviation is using ‘mystery shopping’ to monitor and drive service standards within the 22 catering concessions that it operates at Heathrow Airport. The company serves some 76,000 airport and airline staff and contractors and has achieved a 7 per cent...
Mystery Shopping for Profit at Polarn O. Pyret
Mystery shoppers can directly contribute to better customer service levels resulting in increased sales, says Polarn O. Pyret. The Swedish retailer of babies and children’s clothing uses the services of customer experience specialists React CX to develop and support...
What Customers Really Want – But Won’t Tell you
Henry Ford once said allegedly: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” ‘Listen to your customers’: it goes without saying. But are they always telling you everything you need to know to win more customers, more...
Why the Best Customer Experiences are Chalk & Cheese
Golf and cocktails. Bingo and clubbing. Museums and parties. When you combine your current customer experience with something new and novel, great things can happen. Whether you’re a retail, leisure or membership manager: let’s look at the best strategy to achieve...
MSPA Appoints Jill Spencer as Global Chair in ‘Year of the Customer’
The Mystery Shopping Professionals Association (MSPA) has appointed Jill Spencer as Global Chair. She is Associate Director of React CX, the UK customer experience specialist and has launched the ‘International Year of the Customer’. MSPA represents the worldwide...