Stories of Success - The Next Chapter in Bookstore Customer Experience - Synergistic CX Magazine May 2025

Discover the May Edition of Synergistic CX – the Customer Experience Magazine!

This issue explores the art and science of creating unforgettable bookstore experiences, exploring how bookstores can thrive amid digital disruption. Titled “Stories of Success: The Next Chapter in Bookstore Customer Experience,” our May edition unveils the key strategies that turn casual browsers into loyal readers and local bookstores into cherished community hubs.

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In this edition of Synergistic CX Magazine, we turn the page on bookstores, an industry that many feared would be eclipsed by e-commerce and e-readers but instead has proven to be resilient by leaning into human expertise, curated offerings, and magnetic atmospheres. Through rigorous, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) of over 6,000 stores and 33,000 online reviews, we uncover how star-rating trends vary across regions, expose a striking engagement gap in review responses, and map the 7Ps Marketing Mix to reveal which elements excite or frustrate readers most - highlighting that People, Product, and Place together dominate more than 85% of customer conversations. We also pinpoint the critical moments in the bookstore customer journey, such as Initial Staff Greeting and Pricing & Payment steps, that demand immediate attention to boost customer satisfaction.

Our special guest, Lina Schölin, CEO of Better Business Sweden, brings her decades of CX mastery to the conversation. Below are some of the key topics Lina shared with our audience:

• Data to Decisions: How to Translate CX Data into Real Improvements: How consistent audit design and an empowered “Insight Manager” translate siloed scores and open-ended feedback into actionable improvements.

• Journey Beyond Borders: Integrating CX Across Destinations: An 18-step, industry-agnostic methodology that benchmarks service quality across diverse city attractions, uniting stakeholders around shared, data-driven goals.

• 10 Steps to Omnichannel Excellence: Designing Seamless Journeys: A process model for defining problems, mapping cross-channel touchpoints, co-creating service blueprints, and embedding continuous measurement and accountability.

Lina shares hard-won lessons in aligning methodology to purpose, reveals how to empower an “Insight Manager” to turn fragmented data into actionable strategies, and unveils her frameworks for citywide and omnichannel CX excellence.

The “It Takes a Village” case study from Better Business demonstrates how CX@Destination unites a city’s businesses - shops, hotels, eateries, and attractions - behind a single mystery-shopping framework. Evaluators score 18 touchpoints, from website visits to souvenir shop service, across 93 different service units, collectively assessed across 333 data points. Clear visual reports reveal strengths and friction zones, inform joint action plans, and track progress. This approach has elevated tourist satisfaction, inspired neighboring destinations to adopt the model, and attracted global partners, proving that collaborative benchmarking can transform an entire region’s visitor experience.

In the Business Perspective on Linköping as a destination, Jessica Stille Törnqvist, CEO of Linköping City Samverkan, and Jörgen Nilsson, Head of Tourism of Visit Linköping & Co describe how the Kickstart Linköping initiative and the Värdskap Linköping program, partnered with Visit Linköping, align 200 businesses behind a unified mystery-shopping framework. Four measurement waves have tracked clear improvements in cleanliness, local knowledge, and guest engagement. By publicly recognizing top ambassadors and sharing best practices, Linköping has boosted NPS and ROI while fostering a community of service-driven businesses, proving that collaboration and transparent benchmarking can turn a city into a model destination.

The May edition also includes a concise guide to kick-starting your first bookstore VoC survey. Our “starter” template focuses on the top five drivers—staff greeting, ambiance, book variety, staff engagement, and pricing clarity, using a 5-point answer set, and a closing NPS question. This streamlined approach delivers both quantitative scores and qualitative insights, so you get clear, actionable data without overwhelming your readers.

In the closing article, “Digital by Design,” we spotlight Estonia’s e-government transformation - moving nearly all services online and treating citizens as empowered customers. Their intent-driven, agile, and trust-based approach has made Estonia a global digital benchmark. Estonia’s model offers a concise playbook - efficiency, automation, empowerment, collaboration, and agility - for applying CX principles across any organization or community.

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