When the Qualtrics X4 Tour hit London this summer, the software business invited its customers to demonstrate the effects of a science and tech-based approach to improving the customer experience. There Grundfos explained how it moved from standard customer surveys to always-on intelligence gathering.
While the familiar customer satisfaction survey has served us well over the years, they are most often held just once or twice a year, which means you have to wait a long time to hear what’s bugging the people buying from you. Many marketers are recognising the need to move away from surveys and towards an ‘always on’ view of their customers. Grundfos is one such company.
For 10 years it had run an annual customer survey with thousands of participants – it garnered loads of valuable insight, but its marketers had to wait up to a year to understand who was unhappy and why. Abdul Dezkam sits in a hybrid sales and marketing team and leads customer experience management at Grundfos. He explained the work he’s done in delivering real-time customer feedback.
Grundfos: At-a-glanceGrundfos, the global leader in advanced pump systems, is a 73-year-old company selling 17 million units across the globe each year. Its business is as complex as any, yet it manages to act on intricate customer feedback in real-time. 73 years old (founded in 1945)80 companies across the world18,000+ employees worldwide17 million units produced every year€3.4 million turnover in 2017.
"We want to pioneer our solutions, which means we want to differentiate from our competitors – that includes for us, our partners and our customer"
What is your Customer Pulse programme?
Abdul: For 10 years now we have been doing a big annual customer survey with thousands of participants across 80 countries – that includes actions and follow-ups. We found a lot of value in the open comments of our customer surveys and found that a lot of the issues stemmed from a small touchpoint somewhere in the journey, but we had to wait a month to a year to get that survey and understand that someone was unhappy. We had to be closer to our customers with more frequent feedback. That’s why we started our always-on Customer Pulse programme.
Through it we found out that we have more than 200,000 daily customer touches across our website, social media and phone calls.
As 200,000 customer touchpoints means 200,000 chances to get it right or wrong, how do you prioritise what to address?
We ask 15% of customers for feedback across each digital touchpoint. That allows us to see which touchpoints are not really helping our customers select the right product. We also have 2000 sales people driving around meeting customers. The day after each meeting we ask the customer one simple question by email. That is key to our customer policy – we only ask one question – but then we encourage them to give an open text comment.
Any negative customer feedback automatically triggers a process by which one of the many teams provides that customer with a response.
What have you found out about your customers?
We compared the top 25 most satisfied customers with the bottom 25 because we wanted to see if there were behavioural differences. These are the loyalty behaviours that we need to build for the long-term value of the business.
We found that we’re 1.4x more likely to retain our most satisfied customers, that their wallet share was 1.9x higher versus unsatisfied customers and they are 1.6x more likely to recommend Grundfos. Growth with happy customers was 3.26x higher than with unhappy customers.
What makes customers happy? We saw that the critical touchpoints were all the way through the journey so we need to be everywhere at once – we really had to nail the entire customer journey.
How do you bring CX alive in the organisation?
We have what we call ‘Insight’, which is the cultural part of the programme and involves internal CX training and workshops on how to become more customer focused. All of our meeting rooms are named after customer groups and we have huge posters on the wall with customer value propositions – there are a lot of things we do to keep the customer top of mind.
We also have an app that allows our 18,000 staff to see who our customers are and how they fit into our 10 personas, including each one’s pains and gains.
Highlights
- Insight led: Driven by data, not assumption
- CX training across the business: Including HR, IT and finance
- Tech enabled: 18,000 staff given access to customer insight app
- Clear metrics: Switched from annual CSAT survey to an always on ‘customer pulse’ survey.
Challenges
- Standardisation across 80 countries and many cultures
- The average score is not everything – use open comments and absolute numbers
- Making everyone seeing their role in the customer journey – including HR, IT and finance.
Current focus
- Connecting the back-office to the customer journey with ‘topics’
- Advanced comment analysis with light machine learning
- Obsolete averages numbers replacing to create sense of urgency.
