Feedback Prompts Action at No Frills

ELLIOT ZWIEBACH

LAS VEGAS — To be more responsive to customer needs, No Frills Supermarkets, Omaha, Neb., is using a computer-assisted research program to solicit shopper opinions and implement store-level changes, the company said here during a presentation at the National Grocers Association's annual convention.

“This program ensures that No Frills is driven by real feedback from real customers that demand action,” said Evan Juro, principal at Juro Marketing and brother of Richard Juro, president and chief executive officer, No Frills, who also took part in the presentation.

Since the system — called Constant Consumer Feedback, or CCF — went chainwide in April, No Frills has remodeled rest rooms at several stores, sped up the checkout process and eliminated rude, unfriendly cashiers in response to customer comments collected by an interactive voice response system over the phone or emails sent directly to the stores, Evan Juro said.

“Some issues shoppers raise seem so basic, we sometimes wonder why they haven't been addressed before, so this program has made us increasingly diligent about reviewing the comments and focusing on what we do to respond.”

The company enters survey respondents into a drawing to win a $250 shopping spree each month as an incentive to participate, Juro said.

When No Frills installed a pilot version of CCF at three stores early last year, it got more than 2,200 responses, he pointed out — two-thirds by phone and one-third via the Internet.

“However, we were unable to get good participation from Hispanic customers, even though the survey was available in Spanish; questions of privacy were raised, and the same questions had to be asked for all stores, though as of this month we're able to ask store-specific questions,” Juro explained.

CCF has provided access “to an extraordinary amount of information, including who our customers are, when and how they shop, what they like and what they don't like,” he said. “In addition, we can look at the ratings as an average across all stores or for any particular store or group of stores — for the latest month, for month-to-month trends or for a six-month average — and compare our ratings to other supermarkets or Wal-Mart supercenters.”