In this case study, you’ll discover how Tesco Mobile worked with InMoment to evolve its approach to delivering meaningful action from customer feedback. You’ll learn:
- Why feedback matters.
- The importance of undertaking a thorough touchpoint analysis.
- How to empower employees to be able to use customer insight more effectively.
How Tesco Mobile listens to customer feedback and takes action across a range of channels? Image: ShutterStock
Table of Contents
Content Summary
Case study overview
Why feedback matters
Touchpoint analysis
Customer and employees
The results
Case study overview
Challenge: Tesco Mobile’s CX team wanted to ensure it was capturing all customer feedback across a range of channels, and to enhance the amount of insight being made visible and actioned by the wider business.
Approach: Working with InMoment, Tesco Mobile undertook a customer touchpoint analysis, establishing new tools and processes for collecting and actioning insight more effectively.
Result: As well as its NPS score increasing, Tesco Mobile topped the UKCSI each quarter for phone customer service in 2018, ranking as the top telecommunications company in the overall UK customer satisfaction index for that year.
Why feedback matters
Resolve a complaint for a customer, and 70% of the time they’ll do business with you again.
So it’s disappointing to learn that so few organisations get this opportunity – the average business hears from just 4% of its dissatisfied customers.
This disparity is the reason businesses of all shapes and sizes are in a rush to create effective systems to garner customer feedback and, crucially, to take action in response.
42% of European companies increased their spending on customer experience by 10% between 2015 and 2018, with Gartner highlighting that investment in feedback – and Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes specifically – has grown by 30% annually since 2014.
Interpreting customer feedback and taking responsive action has become a unique combination of art and science, partly due to the advent of new channels of engagement, and partly due to the decline in responses to traditional customer surveys amid increasing survey fatigue.
Survey response rates have dropped from 20%, around twenty years ago, to about 2% today.
What’s more, when there’s a long-form survey involved, 70% of people admit to abandoning their response before finishing.
Because of this, VoC programmes are blending new modes of real-time surveying – placed at key touchpoints in a customer’s journey – along with customer listening and data analysis techniques, to ensure that they can understand more about what their customers think about them, without exhausting them with constant feedback requests.
Leading the way
This new approach is something Tesco Mobile has worked hard to craft over the last 15 years, accounting for over 5 million customers in the UK whilst also expanding into Europe.
In recent years, Tesco Mobile has been recognised globally for its customer experience achievements: in Forrester’s UK CX Index as an elite brand, ranking second in the top 10% of brands across all industries behind Nationwide, and placed 30th out of 100 global brands in a 2018 Customer Experience Excellence report.
Tesco Mobile was named by Ofcom as the UK mobile provider to receive the least complaints in its latest report, having consistently been the network with the lowest number of complaints for five years. It has also been named as a Which? recommended provider for nine years running. Furthermore, 98% of its customers said they would buy again according to Reevoo verified sales and service reviews.
This success hasn’t been without its challenges, however. Tesco Mobile knew that it needed to increase the insight it received back from customers and make it more visible throughout the business in order to really drive long term customer experience improvements. It started with its approach to actioning customer feedback.
“It is only by listening to customers that we understand what is working well and not so well,” says Customer Experience Strategy & Planning Lead, Christa Steer.
“We are continuously looking to improve our customer experience and actioning as much customer feedback as possible around the business to drive customer satisfaction. We always champion our customers and our core strategy is centred around ensuring we do right by each and every one of them.”
Touchpoint analysis
Tesco Mobile prides itself on listening to customers, however, in more recent years, there has been a clear need for the business to expand its customer listening programme and drive deeper analysis and insight. As Christa explains: “It became apparent that we needed to be able to understand the different experiences our customers were having with us, at a more granular level.
“We needed to utilise our different touchpoints more; specifically identifying where in the customer journey we were most likely to receive feedback, and using it to identify a new process to bring that data together to understand the key pain points and what customers needed us to improve.”
Christa and the customer experience team led a change programme that involved a variety of tools and channels to really start broadening their customer listening touchpoints and actioning wherever possible. For example, through working with the CX Team, the Social Media Team started responding to all verified organic reviews, across platforms such as Trustpilot, Reevoo and the Tesco Mobile App. Customer responses allowed the team to offer additional support where needed, along with providing contact information to take conversations further offline.
The CX team also collaborated with the Customer Care Team who already had rich customer insight and were highly engaged and keen to make any improvements to customer experience possible.
“We needed to be able to understand the different experiences based on channel purchase journeys and service journeys,” adds Christa.
“We wanted the ability to bring different customer touchpoint feedback together in one place – to be able to then dig into the detail of key areas to improve by channel and journey.
“It was important to have a good self-service portal in place, and an app with real-time data that call centre staff could interpret and act on during customer interactions.”
Customer and employees
Tesco Mobile initiated a partnership with VoC specialists, InMoment, to enhance some of its capabilities around customer listening. Their work was divided into two parts:
- Sales (online, stores, telesales): Helping Tesco Mobile with post-transaction surveys that were simplified and quicker for customers to complete.
- Service (care team, repairs): Honing in on the experience a customer receives when they contact Tesco Mobile for support.
InMoment were also able to implement ‘rescue alerts’ which plug into certain customer channels and allow the Tesco Mobile call centre to triage and contact a customer should they have a clear issue that needed to be acted on.
With the ability to access dashboards and reports on a daily basis through InMoment, Tesco Mobile employees were given enhanced visibility that empowers them to take action.
“From a people perspective, we changed things so that everyone was able to receive regular customer experience insight debriefs. We also wanted the ability for ad-hoc insight on different topics of our choice as well as full training for our people.
“We knew that to achieve our mission, it wasn’t just about making our customers smile, but about giving our colleagues a reason to smile, too.”
Part of its employee training incorporated a new mission: to deliver 3 million smiles (a 9 or 10 NPS score) from customers in 2018.
In addition, Tesco Mobile has also launched a number of other ways to collate insight from colleagues, including ‘back to the floor days’ in which senior members of the team spent time side by side with colleagues, understanding the challenges that they faced while speaking to a customer, and engagement surveys that gave colleagues greater empowerment to share anonymous views on customer experience in their areas.
The results
The combination of customer and employee insight has helped propel Tesco Mobile forwards. As well as its status as a leading brand for CX, it has seen its organic Trustpilot score increase by 1 percentage point since the backend of last year.
Through working closely with the CX team, the Call Centre Care Channel at Tesco Mobile has recently increased its Care TNPS score by 7 percentage points.
The programme of activity has had a profound effect on customer satisfaction. As well as its NPS score increasing, Tesco Mobile topped the UKCSI each quarter for phone customer service in 2018, ranking as the top telecommunications company in the overall UK customer satisfaction index for that year.
Also, according to Tesco Mobile’s verified Reevoo reviews, 98% of customers would buy again from Tesco Mobile.
“It is only through this process of recalibration that we’ve been able to truly understand what areas need our attention and also what we should do more of,” adds Christa.
“Embarking on a new CX feedback programme is worth the time it takes to get up and running, as the insight sets your business up for longevity and success in the future. Capture all feedback you can but ensure you can fully analyse this to derive true customer insight that can then be actioned around the business.”