JD Sports installs feedback technology in all 360 stores

The system, provided by tech provider TruRating, asks each customer a single question as they pay and invites them to provide a rating from 0-9.

Questions rotate between transactions to allow JD Sports to canvass opinion on different elements of the customer experience.

TruRating has designed the feedback process to be as simple as possible to maximise response rates.

The TruRating system has been installed in all 360 of the JD Sports stores and has already gathered feedback from six million customers.

Wayne Davies, retail director at JD Sports, said: “We can use the custom questions to ask really granular, business-critical questions and the huge, representative sample means we fully trust the responses.

“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.

“With TruRating 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.”

JD Sports has received tens of thousands of ratings per store, which has allowed JD Sports managers to discover best practices within individual outlets that can be rolled out to the wider store estate.

Examples of the granular questions JD Sports has used it to ask include whether customers had seen its Christmas TV adverts, which aimed to measure the reach of the campaign and connect it with in-store spend.

Georgina Nelson, founder and chief executive of TruRating, believes that historical methods of collecting and analysing customer feedback have led to low response rates and “the feedback of an animated minority” is wrongly used to reflect “their wider customer base”.

She added: “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.”