How is PSI different?

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." -Henry Ford

As Ford suggested, advice from "real" sales and service customers is misleading. Focused on their own priorities, customers don't pay attention to the sales or service steps critical to a dealership's success.

But traditional mystery shoppers are just as bad, offering guesses and opinions without any facts and science to back it up.

What we needed was a way to factually measure whether specific sales and service behaviors occur…

…those behaviors mathematically proven to turn shoppers into buyers, and service customers into repeat customers.

That is why we developed Pied Piper PSI® as the solution

• Unique, fact-based process.
• First measured the math: What sales and service steps actually drive sales and service?
• Doesn't rely on opinions of either customers or mystery shoppers
• Provides annual national benchmarking by brand and industry. Clients not only measure their own performance, but also understand how their performance compares.

Key to PSI: Applying Fact-Based "Data Science"

PSI's success comes from applying the quantitative tools of Data Science to behaviors present throughout a retail network. For example, Pied Piper has found that retail management is attracted to, and often focuses on retail behaviors that are unusual, memorable, humorous, shocking, etc. (Sometimes managers even study video of their retail location, looking for these behaviors.) But are those behaviors really the "problem?" Rarely.

As Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in his best-selling book, Everybody Lies,

"When relying on our gut, we can be thrown off by the basic human fascination with the dramatic. We tend to overestimate the prevalence of anything that makes for a memorable story. For example, when asked in a survey, people consistently rank tornadoes as a more common cause of death than asthma. In fact, asthma causes about seventy times more deaths."

Pied Piper has found that nine times out of ten retail performance is held back by behaviors that fail to occur, behaviors that management does not see, behaviors that management may not even miss.

Pied Piper's reporting is often what shines a light for clients on what happens at retail, but just as importantly, the behaviors that fail to happen at retail.

How does Pied Piper PSI compare to "sales satisfaction index" customer surveys?

Pied Piper clients have found that it's important to factually measure what really happens, instead of trying to ask customers what happened.

Netflix logo property of Netflix, Inc.

How can we be misled by asking customers for their opinions? Netflix originally tried to ask customers what types of movies they wanted to add to their queue to watch, but quickly learned that the movies customers actually watched were a much better predictor of what customers would enjoy next time.

"The algorithms know you better than you know yourself," said former Netflix data scientist Xavier Amatriain quoted in Everybody Lies.

Netflix stopped using "what customers say" and began using "what customers do."

For years the motor vehicle industry and other industries would survey customers to try to establish a "sales satisfaction index" to provide feedback on the sales process. However, industry executives studied the results and often found them puzzling and conflicting with what they observed first-hand elsewhere.

Today many industries still survey their sales customers, but only to measure what happens after the customer's decision to buy.

• Use sales customer surveys to measure what happens during the time between…
  • When a shopper says "I'll take it" and…
  • the shopper drives away from the retailer, having completed all of the required paperwork and learned about using the product

• Use Pied Piper PSI to measure what happens…
  • For everything that leads up to the decision to purchase, including shopping on-line, phone calls, and all about the retailer visit leading up to "I'll take it."

From Henry Ford's comment about not relying on his customers asking for a "faster horse," to Netflix replacing "what customers say" with "what customers do," to answering the concerns of top industry executives, Pied Piper PSI is the fact-based solution for accurately measuring and improving how sales and service teams turn shoppers into buyers and service customers into repeat customers.