JD Sports champions feedback – every customer has a voice with new ratings platform

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Taking a huge step to put the customer at the heart of its business, JD Sports (part of JD Sports Fashion plc) has selected and rolled out TruRating's customer ratings platform across its 360 stores. Since go-live, over six million of their customers have been empowered to feed back.

Each customer is asked a single anonymous question as they pay and push one button to rate from 0-9 on the payment device. Questions rotate between transactions, so retailers can ask about different aspects of the customer experience and get almost immediate answers. Because of its simple design, TruRating attracts an extremely high response rate— allowing retailers to hear from an unprecedented majority of their customers.

For the first time, JD Sports are able to drill down into NPS in every store, every hour of every day, helping them drive a consistent customer experience and reach performance targets. Ratings are tied to transaction spend, helping the retailer understand the ROI of any measures they take to improve customer experience.

Some key insights JD Sports has already gained through TruRating include:

• By asking customers whether they had seen Christmas TV adverts, JD Sports were able to measure the reach of the campaign and connect this with spend in-store.
• Unprecedented consumer engagement has enabled JD Sports to measure service quality at a store level. With tens of thousands of ratings per store, JD Sports managers discovered best practices within outlets that they could implement across the wider estate. They could then monitor the impact of these initiatives.
• TruRating's massive dataset also enabled JD to unpick the factors that were driving NPS scores. This provided clarity on where to take action and what parts of the experience are most important to JD Sports customers.
• TruRating gave JD Sports a better understanding of store manager performance. They have been able to use the genuine feedback from millions of paying customers as an additional KPI to consider alongside existing financial performance metrics.

"The beauty of TruRating is the way in which it simply plugs into our existing payment platform but is flexible enough to be moulded to meet our precise needs. For instance, we can use the custom questions to ask really granular, business critical questions and the huge, representative sample means we fully trust the responses," said Wayne Davies, JD Sports Retail Director. "With other customer experience programmes, the statistics never matched what we could observe in the store. That's because we only got a handful of responses per store per quarter. But with TruRating, the numbers make sense. Millions of proven customers are feeding back to us on an ongoing basis. It means we know which stores are going above and beyond for our customers, so our reward system is fairer and managers are taking notice, improving performance."

Davies adds: "NPS has always been important to us, but we'd never been able to fully understand what's driving this on the shop floor. With TruRating, we can actually identify and target areas for improvement, monitor customer sentiment and see how this impact in-store experience.

Most important of all though, is that we're continuously improving the shopping experience for JD Sports customers — helping us enhance service levels. A real testament to the success of the solution is the enthusiasm it is now getting across the wider JD Sports Group."

Georgina Nelson, Founder and CEO of TruRating says: "Collecting and analysing customer feedback has historically presented retailers with a number of business and technical challenges - response rates are low and they don't know if the feedback of an animated minority reflects their wider customer base. With our technology sitting on the payment terminal it's easy for merchants to ask every customer a quick question and get responses they trust. We're thrilled that JD Sports recognise the value of the insights and the ability they now have to make more informed decisions and improve the customer experience."