Interactive Customer Experience (ICX) Summit

ICX Summit: Customer feedback paramount to brands' success

Customer feedback is crucial for retail and restaurant success, driving improvements in products and services based on customer preferences. Learn innovative strategies on gathering and utilizing customer insights from industry experts at the Interactive Customer Experience Summit in Charlotte this September.

Image: Willie Lawless/ Networld Media Group

August 19, 2024 by Mandy Wolf Detwiler — Editor, Networld Media Group

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of retail and restaurant success. In a fiercely competitive market, understanding customer preferences, needs and pain points is paramount.

Feedback helps businesses identify what's working and what's not, allowing for timely adjustments to products, services and overall customer experience. From refining menus to optimizing store layouts, data-driven decisions based on customer input can boost sales, increase customer loyalty, and foster positive word-of-mouth. Ultimately, prioritizing customer feedback is essential for staying relevant and thriving in today's dynamic business landscape.

At this year's Interactive Customer Experience Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina from Sept. 9 to 11, a panel of industry experts will explore innovative strategies for gathering valuable insights from customers and transforming them into actionable improvements across products, services and operations in a discussion called "Listen Up: Tapping Customer Feedback to Improve Your Business."

Panelists will share their expertise on a range of topics, including:

Effective feedback collection methods: Discovering the most efficient ways to capture customer opinions, from surveys and social media listening to in-depth interviews.
Leveraging customer data: Transforming raw feedback into actionable insights to identify trends, pain points and opportunities for growth.
Implementing customer-centric changes: Demonstrating how to use feedback to drive meaningful improvements in products, services and overall customer experience.

Panelists include:

Kelli Johnson, marketing manager of Furniture Mart
Eric Knott, CEO of Tiki Taco
Robin Robison, COO of Modern Market Eatery
Alex Tallman, director, retail experience and education for Fleet Feet

Tallman said Fleet Feet's business model centers on our customer experience, and customer feedback is critical to continually improving and evolving that experience. "By actively listening to our customers, we can better prioritize the initiatives with the biggest impact," he said.

Brands often make mistakes when collecting feedback.

"In my opinion, you need to engage in a software that makes it easy on your guest and your team to give feedback as well as reply to that feedback," Knott said. "Too often we find ourselves logging into multiple places to read and reply to guest feedback, not to mention most of those are public facing. I suggest a partner to assist both your guest/team in this process like Ovation, the aggregate all feedback into one platform and make it easy on your guest with a two-question survey, as well as your team with the ability to reply right from the app."

Johnson said collecting feedback is important to brands because it helps brands see issues in their operations. "Collecting customer feedback is crucial, not only to showcase what your business does well but also to identify areas for improvement in the customer experience," Johnson said.

The panel will be moderated by Ben Story, CEO of Avius, which is sponsoring the event, and it will take place Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024 at 10:15 a.m.

The panel talk is one nearly two dozen sessions during the ICX Summit, which is celebrating its eighth year. To register for the ICX Summit, click here. The event is being held with the Bank Customer Experience Summit, and one badge gains you entry to both events.

About Mandy Wolf Detwiler

Mandy Wolf Detwiler is the managing editor at Networld Media Group and the site editor for PizzaMarketplace.com and QSRweb.com. She has more than 20 years’ experience covering food, people and places.

An award-winning print journalist, Mandy brings more than 20 years’ experience to Networld Media Group. She has spent nearly two decades covering the pizza industry, from independent pizzerias to multi-unit chains and every size business in between. Mandy has been featured on the Food Network and has won numerous awards for her coverage of the restaurant industry. She has an insatiable appetite for learning, and can tell you where to find the best slices in the country after spending 15 years traveling and eating pizza for a living.

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