1. About Simple Mart
Simple Mart, a community retail brand under Sunny Trading, has built its identity on "good quality, low prices" throughout Taiwan's neighborhoods, with more than 800 stores nationwide.
In 2018, Simple Mart launched its Smart Shelf for corporate clients: a plug-free vending shelf paired with a dedicated app that lets employees order online and pick up in person. Today, the Smart Shelf is present in the offices of more than 100 corporate clients across Taiwan.
2. Simple Mart's Goals and Challenges
As the retail market undergoes digital transformation, Simple Mart has steadily built out an OMO (Online Merge Offline) strategy: customers grab coffee at Simple Mart in the morning, shop the Smart Shelf during work hours, and order from GO Simple Mart online after work, forming an integrated online-offline daily life circle. To complete this transformation, Simple Mart faced the following challenges:
Challenge 1: With the Smart Shelf placed in corporate offices, how do you gain real-time insight and respond to needs? Challenge 2: After going digital and facing tens of thousands of consumer surveys a year, how do you turn results into insight quickly? Challenge 3: For ticket sales service, customer support spends huge amounts of time explaining things. How do you lower that communication cost?
The SurveyCake editorial team visited Simple Mart's headquarters to learn how the company uses SurveyCake to solve these three challenges. Let's take a look.
3. Simple Mart x SurveyCake: Three Enterprise Solutions
Here are the three solutions Simple Mart built with SurveyCake to maximize the business value of surveys.
(Caption: The Simple Mart Smart Shelf displays snacks, drinks, and other products, letting corporate employees shop right in the office.)
✦ 1. Real-Time Consumer Intelligence: Building an Actively Listening Corporate Retail System
Beyond displaying products, the Smart Shelf also prominently features a SurveyCake survey form. When employees submit feedback through the form, it is reported to Simple Mart's internal team by email in real time.
Simple Mart Business Manager Freya Kuo shared: "Whether corporate employees are making a wish or giving feedback, we receive an email notification the moment they submit." SurveyCake's real-time notification feature is key to helping Simple Mart get first-hand information from clients faster, letting internal staff respond to corporate needs more promptly.
For businesses that care about customer satisfaction, SurveyCake also offers a conditional alert add-on that helps stores stay on top of the key moments that determine whether a customer stays or leaves. For example, when a customer selects "unsatisfied" on a dining satisfaction form and submits, the store's system triggers an alert so on-site staff can respond immediately.
✦ 2. Intuitive Business Insight Charts: Accelerating Strategy with Visual Charts
Simple Mart runs two large-scale consumer surveys every year, collecting a combined 15,000 responses. Faced with this volume of feedback, SurveyCake shows clear advantages over traditional market research: it saves enormous time and labor, and eliminates the errors that come with re-entering data.
Customer Relations Manager Fiona, who previously worked at a market research firm, also praised SurveyCake's charting capabilities. She shared an example: "We once surveyed consumers about a new product and found that most customers hadn't even noticed the launch. That insight, seen across the entire channel, pushed us to rethink our strategy, and we ultimately succeeded in raising awareness for a new beverage."
Additionally, whenever Simple Mart updates its app, it first has store managers from more than 800 stores nationwide test the new features and complete a survey. Freya noted that SurveyCake's dashboard converts responses into intuitive visual charts in real time, making the feedback from over 800 store managers clear at a glance.
Beyond visual charts, SurveyCake's Cross Tabulation feature helps businesses uncover key insights customers never explicitly stated. Combined with statistical charts, this gives a more complete analysis of survey results and avoids the bias of relying on simple averages.
✦ 3. Surveys as Mini Landing Pages: Dramatically Cutting Customer Service Labor Costs
Simple Mart has also applied SurveyCake to after-sales ticket service for government agencies. To gather feedback from public servants in real time, Simple Mart attaches a QR code auto-generated by the SurveyCake dashboard when delivering tickets, and embeds usage instructions with images and video directly in the survey, turning it into a mini landing page.
"We used to rely on customer service reps to collect feedback, which took a lot of time. Now with SurveyCake, we can easily handle even a thousand-plus responses," Freya recalled. Simple Mart's clever use of SurveyCake saves customer service the time of explaining processes and lets them compile customer feedback quickly.
4. Results: Building an Automated Feedback Channel and a Data-Driven, Ever-Evolving Retail Ecosystem
From neighborhood retail stores and the Smart Shelf to online shopping, Simple Mart is opening new retail markets through its OMO strategy, with SurveyCake providing the consumer insights and key value data behind its business decisions.
In the wave of digitalization, only businesses that can quickly grasp and respond to consumer needs stay ahead. As the dialogue channel between Simple Mart and its customers, SurveyCake has become a key tool that sets Simple Mart apart, from the neighborhood to the corporate office and into people's hearts, creating an ever-evolving retail ecosystem for customers.
SurveyCake Meets Retail's Need for Real-Time Customer Communication, Making Hidden Opportunities Visible
SurveyCake ENTERPRISE is a survey solution built for enterprises, helping them continuously collect valuable data through surveys and quickly uncover opportunities to support strategy.
To learn more about survey applications in retail, or if you are interested in the SurveyCake ENTERPRISE plan, contact us. Fill out the Enterprise trial form and a specialist will reach out to understand your organization's needs and ideas.
