Customer Intercepts:
Your Customers Talk About You Already; Will You Listen?

Access your customers' perceptions of your store with their experience fresh in their mind. Our trained and certified Field Agents conduct incentivized interviews with departing customers to provide rapid information about their perceptions, priorities, and pain points.

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Customer Intercept: From Customers’ Lips to Businesses’ Ears

One of the most flexible tools in the market research toolkit, customer intercepts place Field Agents outside your locations to conduct interviews with customers as they depart. Customer intercept surveys can be oriented toward evaluation, prediction, and validation.

Evaluative customer intercepts give insight into how customers feel about your business, and can be combined with mystery shops to provide a baseline for future research:

  • Are you meeting customers' service expectations?
  • Who do your customers feel are your biggest competitors? How do you stack up against them?
  • What improvements would your customers like to see?
  • How do customers think you can give them a great in-store experience?

Customer intercepts can also be oriented towards the future. Shifts in product, marketing, and brand identity are all costly, and it pays to test the waters before jumping in. Use predictive customer intercepts to find out:

  • Will your customers respond favorably to a new product offering? Knowing the answer to this, as one client found out, can save millions in a costly, unsuccessful product launch.
  • How will your latest marketing campaign land among your loyal customers? Are you sending the right message?

Finally, after investing in improvements to your products and locations, you may want to find out if your customers are aware of the improvements, and more importantly if they are crediting you for them. Customer intercepts can validate:

Product and location format changes

Have you gotten the response you wanted from your changes? Have your customers?


Marketing efforts

Are your campaigns landing, and with whom? Is it time to double down or fold?


Employee training programs

Have employees' new service behaviors impacted customer perceptions of your location? Should you ramp up or discontinue these efforts?

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Customer Intercepts, the TrendSource Way

No, we did not reinvent the mousetrap, and, no, we are not going to tell your bosses that standing outside a building and asking questions is rocket science. It's true, customer intercepts, on the surface, are a very simple concept. But lurking just beneath is a complex and dangerous world where poorly designed surveys and poorly executed programs can lead to inaccurate data and erroneous conclusions.

That's why we leverage our 25+ years of experience designing hundreds of customer intercept programs to ensure you get yours right the first time by:

  • Making sure you are asking the correct questions to uncover the insights you are looking for. Our Insights managers are not just data nerds, they're also survey junkies. They'll make sure you aren't using ten words to ask a five-word question, that you are not leading or otherwise influencing respondents, and that your data is validated and vetted.
  • Combining intercepts with other methodologies to ensure the portrait you are getting is complete. We are a full-service shop, and sometimes customer intercepts are only one piece of your puzzle.
  • Guaranteeing 100% coverage for your locations in the United States and Canada. Wherever your customers are, we will intercept them.

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