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.