Market Force Information: Analytics Solutions for Driving Customer Experience

Could you please walk us through the working mechanism of your offerings?

Market Force provides a host of performance measures that focus on the Service Profit Chain, which is the premise that engaged team members execute more consistently on an organization’s standard operating procedures, which drives greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. The measures that we use include mystery shopping, customer and employee surveys, contact center services, and social media monitoring. But these are simply data points; to be useful, they have to be transformed into knowledge and actionable insights. We do this by leveraging our predictive analytics practice to link these measures to financial performance to help brands understand the gaps to be filled and the value of improving business performance.

The data is subjected to several sophisticated modeling processes that allow Market Force to deliver what we refer to as a Criticality Index. Some clients are focused on same-store sales growth, while others focus on different measures such as gallons sold, net activations, or RevPAR. Each industry has its own set of KPIs and knows why those measures are important to them. Once we have delivered the Criticality Index, we then provide a location segmentation model to explain which locations are delivering the best performance with respect to the key drivers and which are delivering only on some of those key drivers. By providing the segmentation, we enable our clients to develop prescriptive measures across distinct groupings of locations to empower action.

The last component of our offerings is the What if? analysis. This is the calculation of the potential increase in the KPI if targeted improvements are successful. Having this predictive ROI focus is what helps executive leadership teams align and focus on a subset of the most important actionable insights. We then report those results and the value of improvement through a technology platform. This platform helps organizations understand everything about their business, in real-time. Decision support is enabled, and the brand can drive action on what it needs to achieve to engage its front line staff better, execute on customer expectations, and, ultimately, improve its financial performance.

Could you please cite one client story to justify what your company does?

Market Force has been working with a very successful fast-casual restaurant brand with over 1400 locations for over ten years. We began working with this brand when they only had a little over 300 locations. They have scaled substantially over the term of our working partnership. The first service that we provided to this brand was mystery shopping, a systemic operational measure. We helped them evaluate their execution on both lunch and dinner every week. We then developed and deployed a customer survey program to help them understand how their adherence to brand standards was resonating with actual paying guests. They needed to understand how high performance helped enhance customer perception and how low performance damaged the customer experience. With both data sets in progress, we applied our predictive analytics approach to help assess which measures would drive the most improvement. We were able to discern that those restaurants that performed consistently well on certain attributes observed the same-store sales growth rates of about 5 percent and those that did not notice negative sales performance of about -2.0 percent (a +6.0 percent swing between the two). We then provided those attributes to the business so that they could internalize the insights and develop action plans to improve on the areas that had been identified. Those that improved their performance were able to achieve +6 percent same-store sales growth.

What does the future of Market Force Information look like?

We will continue to focus on the KnowledgeForce^® Platform and features that allow clients to incorporate increasingly diverse data sets and integrate sophisticated modeling that allows the combination of those data sets to drive meaningful, actionable insights. The newest release of the KnowledgeForce^® Platform is slated for the early half of 2020, and we are looking forward to helping more brands ingest their performance data, identify the linkages between those measures and financial results so we can empower them to work on those things that will have the biggest impact to their business.