HelloFresh is a global integrated food solutions group and the world's leading meal-kit company, operating in 18 countries, including the US, EU, Australia, and Canada.
As the company was going through rapid expansion over the last 8 years, the team diligently optimized its supply chain to become a more efficient and environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional food supply chains.
By leveraging customer insights, HelloFresh became more agile, and customer-centric as a company:
- Preventing customer churn by reducing negative sentiment across multiple areas, including packaging, delivery, and ingredient quality
- Improved operations efficiency through faster decision-making processes
- Increased accountability across operational departments
We spoke with Stefan Platteau, Associate Director of Global Product Strategy and Analytics, to learn how Chattermill helped HelloFresh optimize its Operations, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management.
The Challenges
Q: What are the primary operational challenges faced by the meal kit delivery industry today?
Stefan: Operations in a food-related business are quite challenging because you must accurately forecast what will be sent to customers and inform your suppliers accordingly. Our product and customer base are constantly changing, making long-term forecasting really difficult.
There are also significant challenges around the customer experience itself. The margin of error in delivering a great experience is very small. We need to ensure that the box is produced on time, contains high-quality ingredients, and is delivered in good condition. Meeting these customer expectations is challenging, but it's crucial to be successful in this space.
On top of that, our teams manage multiple priorities. They also lack direct access to our customers, so it becomes crucial for us to bridge that gap. Our objective is to equip them with tools and resources to understand customer concerns and perceptions. We need to provide customer data in a format that’s easy to understand and tailored to their requirements.
Q: How does a negative customer experience impact your strategic business goals?
Stefan: One of HelloFresh's unique selling points is convenience. If something goes wrong with your order, like a missing ingredient or a box that doesn't arrive, it affects the customer experience. One bad experience can outweigh multiple positive ones, so it's really important to get it right every time. If we don't, it affects how customers perceive us and whether they trust us as a brand.
The Solution
Q: How does HelloFresh collect customer feedback to understand what are the biggest customer concerns?
Stefan: When customers encounter issues, they generally report them to our customer care service. This allows our agents to automatically track and categorize the nature of these issues.
But we try to add an extra layer to that through insights from other data sources, like the NPS survey. It's crucial for us to capture those, as customers choose to report issues through various feedback channels. Chattermill helps us understand these issues comprehensively.
In fact, we've analyzed the feedback received through customer support and compared it to feedback from other channels. Sometimes, these two sources don't align as expected. By analyzing multiple data sets, we get a holistic view of customer insights.
Q: How does Chattermill help you analyze your customer experience?
Stefan: When we receive customer feedback, it goes to Chattermill, which categorizes it into positive and negative sentiment, using predefined categories relevant to our business. Based on this, we've developed dashboards that enable different departments to explore the feedback and gain insights into the customer experience.
Q: Do you share these insights specifically with your Operational Teams?
Stefan: Yes, for instance, we share those with our Production Teams responsible for managing our distribution facilities, or with our Logistics Teams, which handle the transportation of boxes to our customers. Then there are our Procurement and Ingredient Quality Teams, tasked with maintaining supplier relations and ensuring ingredient quality.
Our aim is to provide each team with relevant information to support decision-making. For instance, if a logistics provider is not meeting expectations, we notify our team promptly. Similarly, if there are quality issues with specific ingredients, our data enables us to alert our Procurement and Food Safety teams in a timely manner.
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Q: Which Chattermill features do you find the most useful?
Stefan: Well, one of the advantages of using Chattermill is its ability to enrich customer feedback with additional operational parameters. For instance, when customers provide feedback, we can analyze factors like their loyalty score or the specific distribution center they were served from.
This data can be then used for a detailed analysis. For example, we can use it to compare the performance among our production facilities. In the U.S. alone, where we operate 12 facilities, we frequently assess their relative performance.
In the past, we've observed varying NPS scores across different distribution centers. By dissecting these scores into categories, we can pinpoint areas where one center excels over another. While it doesn't provide a complete solution on its own, it guides our Operations Teams by highlighting specific categories that stand out from the others.
The Results
Q: Can you give examples of customer insights that surprised you or made a significant impact?
Stefan: A few years ago, we updated the packaging of our sour cream. Immediately after implementation, we noticed a significant increase in negative customer sentiment regarding issues like leakage in their boxes. Through a quick analysis in Chattermill, we identified that the new packaging was the problem and that it was simply unsuitable for transportation.
We were able to revert that change quite quickly, and the negative spike immediately dropped. Still, without Chattermill, it could have taken us longer and caused a negative experience for even more customers.
Q: How has Chattermill impacted the speed at which you can make changes in the operations space?
Stefan: In certain areas, such as packaging, real-time changes are challenging because process improvements take time. However, for issues like ingredient quality, we can act really fast. When we detect a surge in negative feedback around a certain batch, we can pinpoint the problematic ingredients, check their availability in our distribution centers, and prevent further distribution to customers.
We can identify most of the issues quite quickly through the Chattermill feedback analysis. For larger patterns and trends, we can discover those within a couple of weeks, often within 12 days.
Q: What would you say is the biggest benefit of using Chattermill?
Stefan: I think Chattermill helps us gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey. In recent years, we've increasingly used Chattermill in our operations, yielding significant benefits. Nowadays, we can assess the customer experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey. Many of these touchpoints are crucial for our Operational Teams, historically less exposed to customer-related data. This has changed for the better, and Chattermill is helping us drive this transformation. It provides our teams with the insights needed to prioritize the customer in their decision-making process.
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Q: How does Chattermill differ from other solutions available on the market?
Stefan: I would say that Chattermill is definitely a platform for all teams. Particularly over the past couple of years, we've tried to democratize customer feedback, and Chattermill has played a big role in making that possible. When I compare it to other platforms, Chattermill is quite open-minded in terms of how many users you can have. That seems like a small thing, but if any person in Operations or in Product is interested in better understanding our customers, I can give them access to Chattermill and just let them explore it. I think that's quite a powerful way to bring everyone closer to your customers.
Q: What would be at risk if you didn't use Chattermill?
Stefan: If we didn't use Chattermill, I think we would struggle to understand our customers. We interact with customers at numerous touchpoints, and Chattermill ensures we optimize each of those touchpoints effectively.
What's next?
While integrating the voice of the customer into the company's culture remains a continuous journey, HelloFresh consistently utilizes customer feedback to optimize its Operations, Logistics, and Supply Chain Management.
Insights from Chattermill have enhanced product quality and empowered teams for informed decision-making, reinforcing operational excellence and cementing their market leadership.
Discover how Chattermill can help you leverage customer feedback to optimize operations and drive business growth – book a demo today.
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