Hello and welcome to the Retail Podcast.
Today we're joined by Tim Waterton from Happy or not.
Rather than keep him hanging on the stream, let me bring Tim
onto the stream saying welcome to the podcast.
I'd be so surprised if someone hasn't seen your product in a
retail airport. You name it, your your product
and service has been there. But for those who don't know,
you just give us an overview what what Happy or not is all
about. Yeah, you're right.
We do tend to get seen typically in airports.
London Heathrow is the classic one for me.
We've deployed I think probably across 130 plus countries now
4000 brands. A few of the retail brands I
guess that would pop out would be Little Spa, Inditex, Zara.
So lots of varieties of bread, yeah.
But essentially people will have seen smiley terminals and
they'll understand how that kind of works.
But the the real principle behind what we do is very light
in the moment, richness, capture or feedback at scale, and
probably shouldn't be confused, if you like, by the simplicity
of the interface, I mean the Smileys are very engaging,
culturally agnostic, They're language agnostic.
That's kind of why they work that way.
But there are follow up questions behind that on
different ranges of our devices and we're able to get that data
back to the core in real time, slice it and dice set, match it
with other stuff and come up with a whole bunch of insights.
So the subtlety and the magic really happens behind the scenes
rather than a point of capture. But obviously there's really
quite a lot to making sure that we stand out as a brand and pop
out, if you like, from the background and generate the
volumes of feedback that give us the data to cure.
So I mean, look, let's let's let's just unpack that cause I
think there's a you, you, you, there's a lot of competition out
there in this space and and people take a different approach
to to feedback. So if I'm one of your, I mean
obviously the use cases will vary whether you're a grocer and
where, where you put the terminals and what you're hoping
to get. But what?
What do you find? What's the number one reason
customers come to you and choose yourselves?
What? What what?
What's their thinking and what just to add to that what did
they not think that sort of surprised them once you sort of
they got to know you a little bit better or they started
deploying the because everyone has the perception of I'm going
to get immediate feedback for example at point of sale if
someone had a good experience through their path to purchase,
right. I assume that that's that's top
of mind for a lot of folks, but what are the things that they
don't expect that they get from you?
That's a very good question. I think that there's so many
examples of deployment even within retail, because retail in
itself is so multifaceted, right?
So, yeah, you know it's high value electronics or whether
it's kind of very fast flow convenience store, fundamentally
different businesses for sure. So one thing is the real time
nature, so real time nature. And I've talked about Heathrow
in many situations, in convenience stores, in league
dietas, etcetera. Some about the voices actually
popped into the washing, right, Because nobody likes about
washing. That's a fact of life.
A lot of that that was employed in washroom, immediate, real
time feedback allows people to get in there and deal with any
situations they've actually need to deal with.
Terminals be real lot like live. As in if you are hitting you're
getting negative sentiment. Is it feedback live or is it a
collated? That I there's there is a
latency involved obviously, but we're talking like a couple of
minutes rather than talking about hourly chunk of data,
right. So it's not real time in the way
of kind of low latency trading on Wall Street.
We're not at that level. We're not going to invest at
that level. But it's it's meaningfully real
time in the context of an operational team on ground.
So things that people are surprised about, they're
surprised about when they're busy hours are the surprised at
the difference in perception of service from hour to hour.
I mean good examples attention example actually I think sees
them at Spar actually had an interesting experience with us.
She I familiar with Spa, right. Obviously I I grace a some
significant scale. First example that they found
out was, ironically, a broken fridge.
Right. So what actually happened was
they started to get a cluster of negative feedback as people were
leaving the store having come back to return mill that was off
ohh wow. And they were able to look at
the open feedback and sit there and realise that there was a
spike of people complaining about the milk.
They went down that aisle, checked the fridges and found
that one of the fridges would break and actually the milk in
that refrigeration unit was warm.
So guess you could find that any bunch of ways, but they got to
it quickly. Couple of things obviously you
know fridge back, yeah but apart from getting the unit fixed,
they changed their operational procedures to make sure that
they did a walk around and check the bridges on a regular basis.
Similarly, I I think again I've Susan's examples are always
good. The the other one was a cluster
of negative feedbacks simply because a member of staff was
particularly slow on the checkout.
Now that happens. It was a junior member of staff
so she was able to respond straight away by flipping that
person off the checkout, putting the more experienced staff
member on the checkout and then applying some kind of training
in the background to get that member of staff up to speed.
You know it's it's many embarrassed.
I think some organisation was a response actually over busy
periods, very, very busy period and allocation of labour is
often an issue, right? So whether we can get more folks
onto the tools, onto the checkout process when we need
to. But actually the other thing
that she did, which is now quite commonplace, I noticed, but she
she gave them headsets so they could communicate so they could
discreetly notify each other when they were getting overrun
and they needed help. How do people find this?
So sorry, I missed the last point.
Identifying pinch points? Really.
Yeah, so how do you what's the gap between negative sentiment
and attribute to negative sentiment?
So if you're picking up negative sentiment like at the checkout,
how were they able to what what what was the?
How do they realise it was actually the person checking
them out as opposed to, I don't know, the size of the queue or
something? Yeah, sure.
So it has a little bit to do with the variety of devices.
So we have different devices in different form factors.
So from the very lightest about devices which is a mini device
which is purely touch buttons and they feedback, it's not a
tablet based device that can be deployed individually on
checkout lines. So we have an example with the
supermarket in New York where they have 27 of their stores
breaked out without your not equipment and actually they have
a mini device on every single checkout lane.
So they can find out if they're getting negative sentiment on,
you know nine or eight or seven. They also have those mini
devices or all of the specialty food stands, so the fish stand,
you know, the cold meat stand etcetera.
So they understand if they have a problem there and they then
interestingly they complement that by using our tablet device
back of house in the breakout areas supported by QR codes on
the walls and on the lockers to get employees experience because
they understand that sink between employee experience and
customer experience and there's a very strong correlation slight
statistically and not just intuitively.
So it's a smart way for them to do that.
It's a smart way to give their employees voice.
And I think we probably all acknowledge that you know you if
you've got a happy customer, if you've got a happy employee,
that's no guarantee that you're going to deliver a really happy
customer experience. But if you've got an unhappy
employee, it's pretty much certain that it's not going to
be a great customer experience. How does that so when when you
look at experience and its relationship to conversion,
upsell and you know the financial side of things, again
how, what does that look like? Is there is there proven data to
say X amount of happy customers led to higher conversion or
repeat purchases? Yeah.
Coming from a CR, a position and a sales background, I wish there
was an absolutely simple formula to translate those to you
because it would just make it so much easier to explain to people
that genuinely campus and numbers behind it for you.
So one of our customers are actually a large convenience
store chain in the US Yeah, they're actually HQ in
California. They've got 500 locations and
then serving the across Washington, Oregon, Nevada, I
think Colorado as well. They have been running a project
with us for a period of time and multi phased rollout project
across their fleet, across the brand and like most customers
they wanna know what the impact is.
What are you gonna do to top line?
What are you gonna do to my bottom line?
And they've run a comparison test between a control set of
stores of exactly the same mix of configuration, square
footage, etc. And what they noticed was that
happy or not stores experienced between a 3% and 5% increase in
sales versus the control group. Ohh wow.
So obviously that would be specific to their business.
It doesn't always that's why I'd love that to be a formula across
the piece, but obviously it didn't.
But it is specific to their business and and I would
compliment them as there are there are company who look at
the data and therefore take action on the data.
So the data itself is worth nothing.
It's only when customers actually look at the data and
decide actually, yeah, we need to do some more training here or
we need to adjust our staff rostering here, etcetera.
But 3 to 5% is hard to buy in today's markets.
So obviously we're accelerating that project with them and look
forward to that being a great success.
Yeah, I mean, look, everyone's trying to do more with less,
right? Budgets are constrained,
inflations coming down but still high and and there's a,
especially in the UK, there's a cost of living crisis and in
some various other countries around the world.
So do you find that people naturally drift by wanting to
make the invisible visible? That's the primary sort of
engagement there, right? Because they're not.
What? What other metric or how else
are they supposed to understand how well that store estate is
performing? Yeah, 100%.
It's trying to surface that magical bit of data that allows
me to, I guess, make small incremental operational
improvements. They're going to net out at an
improvement on the bottom line. So that's definitely what
they're after. And he used visible and
invisible. You're right, it is invisible.
This crazily invisible. But the kind of feedback you get
from this stuff is really like having your customers as your
McKinsey giving you advice about what you should do with your
business. And they're not all right, For
sure they're not all right. But if you look at that in the
round and it's got statistical validity, I would definitely be
listening to them all day long. And by the way, it surprises.
There's a lot more positive feedback than there is negative
feedback. And you asked earlier about what
surprises do people get. That's actually probably the
biggest one. No one.
But they they they're desperately coming to the table
looking to how we're going to tune the business and what can
we do and what are we doing wrong.
Yeah. Only enough they find out an
awful lot about what they're doing, right because human
beings are generous souls that are.
I like to think so and and they share positive feedback probably
more often than they do negative feedback and are really smart
customers bake that in and make sure they read that back to
frontline staff from regional management and store management
and some of them wrap incentive programmes around it.
I would say the one thing not to do is make it part of a bonus
plan. I don't feed somebody with this
stick. It's not there to beat anybody
with. It's far better to turn around
and provide positive reinforcement than than any
negative. And how do you see in terms of
when you look at the evolution of how old is the company?
I companies on over 10 years old, now I'm.
Coming still young right in the in the context of things it's
still a young concept but I mean just from experience I know
building feedback loops has been that sort of magic Nirvana that
reads out like the one that you said about the bathrooms and
making sure you know bathrooms and grocers are you can walk in
there and and and and it's an OK experience.
I'm just curious what what you see the future, how you see the
future then in terms of what, what's the type of of a I was
the type of world we're moving towards in the feedback space?
Yeah. I guess there's a couple of
things in there. The first one I would pick out
is of devices originally. If you go back to that inception
point when Haiti walked into a particular store and repeatedly
got bad service and suddenly decided he was going to go and
build a company out of it, which I have to take it, it's pretty
impressive response, right? Yeah, but we obviously started
from purely button based feedback without having follow
up questions and having open feedback or collection of
contact details or all of that kind of capability, but that
they're all similar kind of things, right?
They've got us to the point where we understand what people
are thinking, why they thinking where and when.
So those four's are kind of covered were recently good
example of AI is a demographics capability.
So we lay it on that, at least a subtle nuance of The Who.
So basically by using the camera and the tablet, not storing
anything that we shouldn't be storing, but basically doing
facial recognition and being able to establish a demographic
fit, we were able to classify that data by age group ranges
and gender as well. Which in retail, you know what
it means, right? If I go into Abercrombie and
Fitch, and I think it's a dark place with loud music, frankly,
they're not that bothered because I'm not so much part of
their target demographic. Yeah, but they really do care,
right? If they 18 year old is in there
and turning around and saying this place is decidedly not,
yeah, so you know demographics is everything, it's it's all the
way through retail in terms of looking at football and video
analytics etcetera. So that's really off side of
your business in terms of what you're talking about there as in
the software side as in there's some form of display you
registered, you know the demographic details or is that
computer vision assumption of demographic details?
It's computer vision assumption of demographic details at the
point of feedback collection from variety of devices retailer
chooses to enable it etcetera. So it's another way, another
rich dimension. It puts The Who, yeah, alongside
the other 4 W And then the way I see it going is I see a whole
load of AI generated insight rather than pointing and
clicking around the charts and the analysis that's there.
Yeah, so we're pretty much a notification based society,
right? So what we really want to do is
receive a notification. We do that right now with things
like real time alerts, but I would like perhaps to subscribe
to the interest over customer service or store presentation or
anything about cleanliness. So I could subscribe to an
interest area for a range of experience points across a
number of stores, etc. And I could receive a
consolidated set of insight from that set of subscribed interest.
I can always dig back into the data afterwards, but I think
that's the way it's going to get because our attention spans are
so much shorter. Yeah, well now we're helping out
loads of businesses by providing A managed service.
So that's not unusual for SaaS companies.
We're deeply familiar with the data that we produce and we also
understand across different environments.
So lots of people are turning around and saying actually, can
you help us run service for us, Can you analyse the data, Can
you help us manage some surveys? Actually, can you do specific
education for our start as well. So we have a measure, analyse,
educate programme as a managed service which is there to quick
start, accelerate or do the happy little thing if you want
to look at it that way. OK.
And then so in in terms of so you you just see more AI LED
analytics on on basically what's happening in your in your store.
So rather than the the store manager.
But there's one thing I always think poor store manager
especially in grocery they get so many reports, right.
You get like a report on every single aspect of the store and
it's like what do I act on, right.
What's priority for me or for, yeah, for them in that in that
moment. And and I I guess that at some
point the AI will say, hey this is real priority because it has
an impact on bottom line which is what the in my mind that's
what feedback really should be able to, to help you accelerate.
So you're getting to that. Is this having an impact on
people checking out as much, for example?
100% and and the data that we produce.
Incredibly powerful in its own way.
More powerful when it's mashed together with a few other
things. So smart environment.
We look at football data as a data source.
We look at the labour management package to look at exactly how
many employee hours are deployed on the floor at any one point in
time. And we also take the sales data
and we then doing that we can generate kind of four subsidiary
metrics that are very, very insightful because kind of
counterintuitive actually in a lot of situations you look at
the data and you think this store is understaffed or this
store they actually really one being understaffed.
And in some situations you then compare it with another store
within the control group and you realise that actually another
store with less staff is serving a higher degree of football and
getting a higher degree of customer experience.
Interesting and. Actually speaking to somebody
very insightful comment from one of the guys at at the IGA and
the way he looks at it and he deals with this all the time, he
said actually management teams probably know that that
particular store is a problem. They probably know that it's low
engagement, they know it's underperforming, but they don't
have the data to point to and turn around and say why and what
should we do over it. So it's it's really about
providing the data that allows somebody to maybe confirm some
of the stuff that's in there. Intuitively, we're making it a
little bit more of a data-driven exercise.
So Tim, having worked with a lot of store managers and retailers
in general and obviously head office workers have a
perspective of the reports that they produce and you speak to
the store manager. But there's this thing about
data and action and the discrepancy between the two.
And obviously that's why I was really interested in how live
sentiment analysis potentially upscales your data.
I don't know if you have any thoughts.
Is that true or is that just or or not?
Are people able to get actionable on feedback?
Specifically, actionable insights that are data-driven
the act in the now. Yes, totally.
I think it's a really key point. Actions, the word that they
excite people, right, That's that's the best, that's what
it's all built on. And I think the fact that the
feedback is captured in the moment is the key to this one.
So I guess my example would be, we're all customers, we all go
into retail outlets all the time.
We all know what it's like when something's not working out and
we can see a resolution for it, but there's no action being
taken and that's up frustration. I can kind of measure it.
My blood pressure probably goes up a couple of pips and and my
pulse rate increases as well. So I could be looked up to
something that would detect it. But if I'm given the option at
that point in time to share some feedback, not irrational
feedback, but actually provide to answer a question, I think
this is the problem and this is what I would do about it.
That is a really valuable piece of business information in real
time. Now reality is I get through
that problem area, I get through that friction point, and I
guarantee that I'm not even halfway across the parking lot
and that valuable piece of business information is
evaporated. It's into the ether.
We will never ever get it back because the negative experience
has kind of launched somewhere in my head and I don't know
where that place is. Like, I'm not neuroscientist,
but it persists. It affects my behaviour in the
future, it affects my probability of coming back and
using the same store again. But I want the next in my life,
right? Whatever the heck that is.
But that piece of business information has effectively been
lost. Unless you captured it in the
moment. Unless you got it back to the
core. Unless you gave the operational
teams chance to react to it and do something good.
So 100% concur, It's all about the action.
It's not about the pretty charts and bits and pieces, it's all
about the action and I guess. That's where you would consider,
that's where you differentiate yourselves I would say, right,
yes. Totally.
I've worked. I I think I mentioned at the
beginning this I'm a data guy, but over data now time it's been
my background. Yeah, so work with huge
warehouses, marks, lakes, whichever ones you want to call
them these days because whichever turns to become more
fashionable. But you know a huge terabytes of
data sliced every which way from Sunday, millions of charts of
different formats, etc. The reality is sometimes people
ask the question, why is the title in green, that they're
really not focused on it. We're we've got far too much of
that. Yeah.
So yeah, platforms that just serve up a huge amount of charts
I think could possibly less interesting to retailers like
you said, they they get a lot of reports.
A heck of a lot of reports, yeah.
Absolutely got a lot. On their shoulders.
So yeah, it's actionable insight.
That's the key. OK, come to the end of the
podcast where can people learn more about, you know, feedback
loops and and what you guys do and help you.
Are you an RF? Are you at any of the major
events coming up? We have.
Been to NR. If we tend to not do a whole
bunch of events, we get a lot of people coming to us, actually.
OK. And I think if you've noticed
this, particularly in the retail space as well, references
everything. Yeah, People trust what they
hear from other folks. And we get a huge amount of our
inbound business from people having positive experience with
us and sharing that with other people.
So I would encourage anybody to literally hit the website
havefearnot.com, take a look at it, tell us what we can tell you
more about what we do and have a conversation with us because
we're actually about trying to help and prescribe the right
solution for people. We're not here to sell you
something that doesn't fit within the business.
If we're not going to make an impact, if we're not going to
move the needle, then we're, we're not going to do business.
But if we can, we've got Tim. As you can see, I can carry on
asking questions forever, but I really appreciate you taking
some time out of your day to come and have the conversation.
Absolute pleasure, Alex. Really enjoyed it.