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All of sudden comes the realisation it’s only 8 weeks to Christmas, or as those of us in business think – there’s only 6 weeks left till the end of the year.

That begs the question… When should we start the Christmas music?

The answer lies in what your business does and who it serves. Every year we talk about how much earlier Christmas arrives. This is prompted by brands competing to be the ‘memorable’ campaign of the season. While some wonder who will win the X Factor or Strictly and, for music lovers, who will be Christmas No.1, big brands like M&S, John Lewis, Argos etc. look to claim their No.1 spot, defining and putting their signature on your Christmas, and aligning your festive shopping experience to their brand and brand values.

As we get ready for Halloween, now is when most mainstream Christmas media campaigns launch. Normally the first TV or radio ad leads other businesses to consider when they should put their Christmas theme and music live.

This got me thinking . . . when is the right time to put on the Christmas music in shopping malls?

For SME type businesses, is it to show that the business is cool, progressive and in tune, to differentiate itself from its competitors that don’t? There is certainly no shortage of critics, or self-declared “Christmas haters”.

The answer, I feel, lies in understanding who benefits from the Christmas music? Who are your customers and where will they hear your music?

The Christmas effect

Examples help us understand who the music is for and how to optimise the experience. How do you transform your typical shopping centre into a winter wonderland, full of splendour and connect to your shoppers? Aside from the grotto, lights and decorations, it’s simple – music!

If you want to evaluate how important music is to your environment, remove it, and observe it with and without its music. This Christmas when you’re shopping stop and notice what is playing, and what the ambiance would be without it?

Timing is key

For many of the centres we work with, Festive music begins around the Christmas Light Switch on, a defining day in the launch of the Christmas shopping season!

This usually starts around the 15th November (or slightly earlier for those eager beavers!). From here, the music plays right up to the 25th and for some into the New Year.

This creates an interesting dilemma – ‘When does the Christmas music actually stop?’ Retail suggests that Christmas ends on the 25th/26th of December. However, don’t the 12 days of Christmas start from the 25th?

In retail, we can establish that Christmas music will begin around the 15th Nov, ending by the 25th or 31st December. The critical key, however, is the execution.

Who are you playing your Christmas music to?

Customers of course! Is that what you thought? Well yes, generally you’re right, but that’s not all.

Did you think about your staff? They are perhaps the most important consideration when choosing when and how to play the music. Staff are your first line of contact with customers, and the human factor can influence whether your customers have a good or poor engagement with your brand.

Your staff are your brand ambassadors and the key to your sales success. There’s a lot of well-established research that links the effect of music on behaviour. Get your in-store music wrong and the downside is significant. Staff retention, motivation and behaviour are influenced by in-store music, and this behaviour can impact the consumers’ purchasing decision.

Before you press play, consider what 18 tracks of Christmas songs on repeat will do to your staff. We’re all familiar with the Chinese water torture routine – you leave someone in a room with a tap dripping all day and night! Looped CDs in retail are the modern-day equivalent in the retail context.

Music speaks volumes

Make your music varied, non-repetitive and refreshing! Equally, how do you define your Christmas music? Pop culture offerings, or classic Christmas tunes?

Transition for effective delivery of Christmas music

 we suggest beginning with 25% Mid to End-November, early December increase it to 50% and save the all-out Christmas content till perhaps the 15th December

Slowly introduce the theme and the music. Don’t rush to put 100% Christmas music on the 1st of November or even the 1st of December. Slowly introduce your music into the mix of the other music playing up to Christmas Day.

At OnBrand, we suggest beginning with 25% Mid to End-November, early December increase it to 50% and save the all-out Christmas content till perhaps the 15th December, when your staff and customers are more willing to accept 100%.

There are many factors to consider before turning up the tunes.

Ask yourself: Which channel will you look to play music into? What does your business do, and who are its customers? Who will hear the music, and how long will they be exposed to it? What type of content is right for you to play?

Avoid CDs, loops and repetition, and ensure you create an engaging and relevant experience for your audience. Finally, ensure you know when your music should revert to its normal pattern.

And you thought the recipe for Christmas pudding was the real Festive debate?

It’s at this time of the year that the fate of shopping centres in 2018 will be sealed. Centre management teams are furiously examining and proposing the budget spend for the forthcoming year ahead.

Against a back drop of continued uncertainty over Brexit, a rise in inflation and a dip in consumer confidence, we’re told many centres are yet again going to be pushed into doing more with less.

MORE 

For me, “more” is a growing recognition of customer at the heart of the industry. Customer is evolving from being the hot topic of last year’s marketing buzz into the tangible challenge of actual delivery in malls. The dawning realisation that a centre management team of maybe 4-10 staff plus security and cleaning contractors will now have to be more accountable and manage directly a significant one to many relationship dynamic across many diverse touch points and channels, creating individual, personalised and positive experiences for each and every interaction. It’s no longer a B2C relationship, it’s now Bob to Celia. And does that mean your teams are now equally in the business of hospitality and retail?

For those in the management chain the keyword is surely accountability. It will no longer be acceptable not to include customer metrics within the usual reported KPI’s. Malls will need to evolve to report on metrics like “What’s my response time to a tweet?”. Equally their tenants will start to demand to know how successful their service charge contribution is to them, with questions like “How many of our retail offers and promotions did you carry this month, and who saw them?”.

The good news is of course that many security teams and operational staff have become very well drilled and good at personal face to face interactions. Indeed, each year the Revo Ace Awards showcase best in class examples.

The widening gap however, is in customer communication online and outside of face to face environments. The recent trend to centralisation and nationalisation of marketing and management has put many centres in a tricky position vis a vis the ‘boots on the ground’ local picture that centres are feeling under resourced to handle. Many centres don’t have control or the tools to manage the growing needs of their customer base and for many they still don’t have a customer management platform to identify who their customer is, beyond the headline demographic based research.

Indeed, a quick search around 50 random shopping centres websites uncovered not one single centre offered live chat, no doubt because the infrastructure to support it isn’t in place.

Certainly the desire amongst centre managers is certainly there. On a centre visit yesterday, I was delighted to see a very switched on centre manager quote Shep Hyken, the customer expert, author, and speaker. (Grab your kindle and download his best selling book, The Amazement Revolution).  The quote is simple, but highly effective and a positive mantra for customer experience.

“Kindness and courtesy are at the root of a positive customer service experience”

The challenge that the industry faces is defining what ‘less’ is.

LESS

Less for me, means smarter. Less means more efficient. Less also means investing in technology. Less means using the tools around that can do more. It’s not about the figure you spend, i’ts about how and where it gets spent.

SPEND MORE EFFICIENTLY

Every day we’re being invited to speak to centres about harnessing and maximising marketing spend. When we examine budgets the first thing that leaps out of the page is the inefficiency in some areas of spend. We uncover some agencies are charging 50% of budget as service fees, which means only half the budget is reaching the shoppers themselves.

SPEND ON CUSTOMER TECHNOLOGY

At the Revo Shopping Centre Management conference in March, I encouraged centres to spend more on customer and technology. There simply isn’t enough spend going into customer facing technology. Second rate online and social experiences are damaging to reputation and engagement. The industry needs to step out of the illusion that a social post a day is the acceptable face of interaction

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

The mantra behind many retail and consumer brands can be delivered for much less than you’d believe. A session of customer journey mapping and discovery will lead to identifying the opportunities to collect valuable data, and then track the customer via their interactions with you, online, socially, on Wi-Fi or physically. Once you have this, then you can engage into managed one to one and relevant context.

Customers don’t think in terms of interaction channels they think in terms of context. In fact, the customer knows the context already and just wants an organisation to ‘know them’. It’s not Business to Consumer anymore or B2C, it’s Bob to Celia and Celia wants personalised service whenever and wherever she engages.

IT’S GOOD TO TALK

Let me give you an example of the brave new world, with one channel – the telephone.

A research piece we ran asked “How do you usually communicate with organisations when you have an enquiry?” 50% identified the telephone, 32% email, 13% website and 4.3% visited the store. However, more telling was that when that enquiry became more complex 41.3% switched to the telephone from the other channels, giving 91.3% choosing to use the phone.

But for most centres, telephony is a neglected opportunity on the budget line – you have a phone, you make calls, you accept the call costs without challenge, the phone system you have lasts years so needs no upgrade and you pay your service fee each month right?

Well, technology has moved on, significantly. New cloud based telephony unlocks so many more opportunities for a mall beyond the financial one. Move from single channel telephony to proper contact management.

TOP TEN REASONS FOR MALLS TO UNLOCK TELEPHONY

1. Save Money – Reduce telephone lines and call charges.
2. Improve internal comms, Move more freely, direct and divert calls invisibly to when, where and how you want. No need to be tied to your desk anymore. Dect & Mobile phones translate into freedom for you and your team. Sync call traffic to align with the working patterns of your team.
3. Identify callers and improve your service. Should a caller who has called twice already for lost property not be presented with the menu next time they call (within a suitable timeframe), and just be connected to the person they last spoke to?
4. Unlock personal profiles and understand customer sentiment. When customers interact, they leave a digital trace. A recorded customer service call, browsing history, web or mobile app usage, transaction history, social or digital chat conversations, all providing the insights to build a more personal profile of a customer.Speech Analytics provides intelligent insights into the customer sentiment. It can provide very precise analysis of words, phrases, categories and themes in conversations, happening daily.
5. Improve customer satisfaction and reduce call volumes for repeated calls. How many callers could self0serve directions, parking info or trading hours with a text back?
6. Enable customers to interact with you how they want to. Handle all voice, data, social and live chat via a single platform. Let customers chat to you via text or live chat from the comfort your mobile (or enable OnBrand to provide first list support of these channels).
7. Improve first contact resolution. Intelligently escalate customers to other channels for more immediate resolution. Create a path and journey for customer complaints or issues knowing in advance you can win on customer satisfaction.
8. Report on key customer metrics. Instant access to caller data, options pressed and who calls you and why.
9. Tenant management & BCP (Business Continuity Planning). Set up call management and emergency/evac contact lists and messaging by a single phone call. No reliance on computers or power in the event of an emergency. Ideal for BCP planning and tenant management.
10. Manage your own phone system. No need for dependency on third party maintainers and charged costs for amends. Want to inform shoppers of trading hour changes – make changes in real time, simply and effectively.

As you can see, a whole world of contact management can emerge from just one channel, and this is available today, and at low cost, and often within the realms of a transfer of spend.

Our advice: Spend more time with the right people, examine what you can get for the same amount by shopping around, and let technology help you do more with less. The more you invest in customers, the more they’ll spend in your mall.

Right now, there’s never been more technology available to reduce customer effort.

So I just returned from an interesting shopping centre managers conference, where a centre manager challenged by his owner on the budget, went out to a small segment of retailers and shoppers to ask the simple question – what do you value? Topics ranged from Xmas decks to background music.

Universally across the two groups, the same feedback came back about background music – neither party felt they ‘needed’ it. Now, i have to say i found this interesting to say the least, least of all of course as we supply many malls with music and messaging services.

By coincidence, i also had an email the same day from another centre, who had a customer complaint regarding their music. This scheme has a large student population so it didn’t come as a surprise to read the following “Hi, just wanted to draw your attention to the fact that you now have a song on your playlist called “First Time” by Ellie Goulding, the lyrics of which include “getting drunk on a train track, way back when we tried our first cigarettes”. This line is repeated often throughout the song, and the word “cigarettes” is the clearest word to come through on the PA system. This could be construed as a pro-smoking announcement, which is illegal under current UK legislation….”.

Finally, this was added to by a marketing manager who liked the ambient music played when they entered the public entrances of the car park of a large scheme, and questioned if this should be the mood of the whole mall.

So on one hand, we don’t notice music, yet on the other, boy do we notice the detail.

And so lies the debate – music is clearly highly subjective, highly divisive and whilst small, clearly sensitive. Now without trumpet blowing, I’ve been involved in music profiling and supply since 2001 and worked with a whole host of retailers, malls, supermarkets, leisure centres, department stores, hotels and cinemas in the UK and abroad. (But ask me what i listen to, and i don’t even have the time to make my own spotify favourites!) The question this begs, is simply, what qualifies us to make a decision on the music played, or whether we play music. Is it driven by the single shopper who makes a complaint, by centre management or by the provider? Why do we all believe so strongly in our own music as the measure of global taste?

I recall two experiences, one – after the launch of Westfield, where we had a hand in the spec of the PA system and music consultancy. We were told, that out of the whole £x million spent, one of the top 3 things commented on in exit surveys was the music, against a whole host of design features, lighting, ambience, advertising, glass store fronts etc. A few months later, we seeded in a media partnership with HMV and a record label Matt Cardle’s X factor song once an hour and lit up the twitterverse with accusations of trying to manipulate him to No.1 (maybe we succeeded!).

So I challenge you, turn off the music on a quiet Sunday morning, and see how empty the big spaces feel without music. Go out in the cold and feel the warmth when you put music with it, see how long you hang around just that bit longer when your favourite track comes on, or see how many people tap and nod when Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean plays out.

You see, its a strange thing music. You might not appreciate or notice it everyday. But take it away or deliver it either controversially or badly and it stands out. Did you know Abercrombie and Hollister deliberately play the music loud and in a way to alienate the customer base they don’t want? Or McDonalds who use faster tempo at lunchtime to rush customers and staff alike? Or how it’s been proven that a certain classical music playlist in mainline rail stations has reduced crime by 30%? If you want to read more research, then please visit musicworksforyou.com an independent music research site, on the power and influence of music.

For us, its crazy that the security guard turns down the music when the centre is quiet not to increase/decrease the volume during the day as footfall demographics change. It’s crazy not to change your playlist at different times of the day and in tune with the mood of your shoppers and in line with who your customers are. No wonder your shoppers don’t notice it – in fact, they do – they notice it when its set to compete with their conversations – or its not relevant, or out of touch. Maybe that’s why they can take it or leave it?

All in all, its a good thing to challenge, and put a focus on music – we love music at OnBrand and we crave the attention from our shopping centres to spend a little more time reviewing it. Get it right and its very rewarding. As they say… all you need is love….