We were joined by more than 35 customers, partners, and friends who wanted to make sure that their choice of AI drives their business outcomes. Over the course of the event, we explored a range of perspectives from customers coming to this for the first time to businesses with mature CX programs
Our panel was chaired by Luke Moore, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and included our incredible customers: Steve Crolic, Associate Director Voice of the Customer, HelloFresh, Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle, Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, CX and Digital Products at Eon Next, and James McGhee, Director of Customer Experience, FootAsylum.
We’re sharing the recording of our panel. So, if you didn’t make it, here’s your opportunity to catch up.
What to expect:
- Resolving retail-specific delivery issues with James McGhee, FootAsylum
- The challenges of manual CX with Catherine Hanys, LeShuttle
- Using the right theme structures with Steve Crolic, HelloFresh
- Discovering previously hidden issues with Abdul Khaled, Eon Next
- Shifting from customer feedback to sentiment analysis with Catherine Hanys, Le Shuttle and James McGhee, FootAsylum
- Getting stakeholder buy-in with Steve Crolic, HelloFresh
- Proving ROI with Catherine Hanys, Le Shuttle
- Everyone’s thoughts on their future dreams for AI
- How to include offline feedback as well as digital channels
That’s just a quick summary. Watch the full recording to hear the industry insights and customer stories shared at the event.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the event.
Resolving retail-specific issues with James McGhee, FootAsylum
So actually, on that note, I'll come to you, come to you, James, first of all, in the middle of this, in the sense of like your time with Chattermill and CX, just ask you to talk maybe about an example of how we can see AI as domain-specific usage within CX. Like, what is that? How is AI helping at all, really? And maybe a story about how you've used AI for CX.
Luke Moore chats to James McGhee of FootAsylum about the ways Chattermill is helping them provide an exceptional customer experience
James McGhee, Director of Customer Experience, FootAsylum: I joined Foot Asylum from AO.com, a company that was customer-obsessed. FootAsylum understood the importance of customer obsession but that sort of post-purchase bit fell by the wayside a little. At AO, I had an army of people that would just scour feedback and negativity and ring those people and make them happy and all of that. And then I got to Foot Asylum and it was like me and a few others. You know, that makes it almost impossible.
So initially, the adoption of Chattermill was to be able to get that all in one place and to be able to get really quick insights for me, really. Because I was used to that, it was the best way of working. Selfishly, you know, I was spending a lot of money on something that the rest of the business wasn't going to be using; it was me. Then, I was trying to influence people with it. But a couple of years ago - I won't ask for a show of hands, but we've all hated couriers at some point, we don't own our final mile - and that is our like key thing.
So if you took a pair of trainers that somebody saved up to buy and are collecting over a wall, and they get wet and everything else, we don't own that. And Royal Mail struck issues a couple of years ago and our main courier tried to pick up some of the slack for that, but obviously didn't want to admit that they were having troubles in doing so because, you know, we hadn't caused it and they didn't want to fall out with us and other clients.
So our contact center's lighting up. I had a contact center manager ringing me every day saying that he might quit. It was horrible. We had delivery data that was backing up the fact that things weren't getting delivered. We were getting reports back that we didn't really trust. But what we had implemented was that all of our tickets and our inbound queries went through Chattermill as well. So using Trustpilot data, App Store data, and our service tickets, we built a picture that this one particular company was killing us really badly. They were killing our reputation, our Trustpilot score was going down, and that's the incumbent in the space, that's where people look before they buy from you.
I was able to sit down with some very senior people there and our account managers and show them very easily the impact that they were having on our business, the fact that their business was benefiting from it because they were cherry-picking who to review, you know, successful deliveries, for example. Their Trustpilot score is going up, ours is going down, and we pay to acquire those customers. And having this data changed the relationship with our delivery company forever. It certainly has put us in the driving seat as to what we want to do with them.
We can feed that back to them at any time, and in fact, they ask on sort of regular occasions at least twice a year for a comprehensive view of what our customers are saying about them. So, they use that as an indicator of how they're doing, because our customers are passionate and will give us feedback. You should probably approach them as a customer because they're really interested in that information all the time. So that helped us massively.
The challenges of manual CX with Catherine Hanys, LeShuttle
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: Thank you very much, James. If you have a question at any point during the conversation you can just raise your hand and we'll let you interject. If you hear something and you just want to ask a question, please raise your hand. You don't have to wait until the end, but I will come to questions at the end as well.
I'm just going to go back to you then, Cat, if you don't mind. You introduced yourself as Cat, didn't you? I was going to say Catherine, but it’s Cat. So Cat, you're kind of at the point now where I guess you may use some form of AI for CX already or you may not use anything.
Luke Moore chats to Catherine Hanys of LeShuttle about the impact of manual analysis on customer experience
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: I wish we had something. I use pivot tables. Well, we have thousands of lines of data every month. Every week in the summer we get data from our post-travel survey. That's the biggest source of information that we have on our customers. So essentially, I don't know if anyone's traveled with us. If you have, you will have received a survey after your return journey. You quite a long questionnaire. But the biggest things that we take from it are NPS and the reason for NPS. We then get all of that data.
It's incredibly high-tech. We put it into Excel. We use pivot tables and conditional formatting. Then we churn out some quite high-level data with highlighter pens. So as I said, I took over this function a few years ago, but we’ve really built the function within the business over the last 12 months. So I've got to the point where we really need to do something else because what we can't keep doing this. I'm really impressed with my team. I think we do a great job with what we've got.
But what we can't do is things like you said Abdul, like when you're talking about discovering the impact of noise in the contact center. If you've traveled with us - hopefully this hasn't happened to you - but if you've spent six hours on the M20 in 40-degree heat with two toddlers in the car, it doesn't take a genius to say that you're going to give us a low score. But what we found out, this is just an example, is that FlexiPlus customers (which is our equivalent of first class basically) when they go through the barrier to get to the FlexiPlus lounge the AMPR is supposed to make the thing go up and they go in and have a lovely experience.
Well, the AMPR doesn't work and it hasn't worked for three years and nobody in the commercial team knew that. Operations knew and they were printing a code on their hanger and they had to put the code in. But no customer knew how to do that. And I just happened to notice a comment saying from a FlexiPlus customer who's paid £800 or something for this crossing, and we can't even get the barrier to work. Now that might have shifted their NPS data. So it's like, we're going to have to change the score by one or two. But that has affected our overall score almost as much as the person who spent six hours on the M20. So it's that stuff. We obviously need to stop delays, but we also need to fix the barrier and make sure the sandwiches are labelled right. It's all of that stuff that we need to get right.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: I love that because again, just in the difference between your introductions, the before and after effect - as a general point - it's still about productivity, it's still about scalability. But it's also the example you touched on; it's also about finding those things that are more nuanced things, which you managed to find, and then you managed to fix.
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: But what else are we missing?
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: But what else are you missing? Yeah. Exactly. And then you start worrying about it. I love that. Great. Thank you, Kat.
Using the right theme structures with Steve Crolic, HelloFresh
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: I was going to come to you next, Steve, because I think at another end of the scale, we've got more than one use case, should we say, going on in HelloFresh. I think we recorded that there are dozens of use cases. I think you said you may have the highest number of theme structures in Chattermill usage. For the audience, maybe you could tell us, Steve, what theme structure is and how it's relevant to use cases, and maybe a bit about your journey eight years into AI for CX.
Steve Crolic of HelloFresh shares his perspective on how to achieve insights on a regular basis with software
Steve Crolic, Associate Director Voice of the Customer, HelloFresh: Yeah, sure. I guess many of you know what a theme structure is and how to use it, but for those of you who don't, yeah, it's a collection of topics that you've defined in advance together with Chattermill to figure out what the main things are that people are talking about in your feedback. So it's very much based on what's in the feedback and then tailored a little bit for what you want to get out of it and how you want to organize the data downstream. Maybe other teams are more amenable to using it because of the way you've organized it.
I think the first and primary use case for us was understanding how customers enjoyed specific recipes. So when you get HelloFresh, you receive a shipment with ingredients. And you cook meals for your family at home. So, right from the very beginning, the culinary teams have always relied on that feedback about the individual recipes to figure out if they need to change a recipe or maybe they've missed the mark and they need to go another direction, all towards trying to develop a pool of recipes that customers will enjoy.
The original problem was that we had a lot of feedback to comprehend and it was kind of overwhelming. So there was kind of the workload perspective of that - of making that achievable on a regular basis - and to apply that feedback in an appropriate way. Over the years we've added things like NPS feedback. We're a subscription-based business for customers, so we also look at feedback when people cancel or when they pause their subscription. And then we bring in some external sources, which I guess you mentioned, James, things like Trustpilot, App Store, and social media. Because the context of those is a little different, we use different theme structures.
In some cases, we have theme structures that are very specific for certain teams. Like, for example, we have one theme structure that's specifically for the people who buy ingredients and do the quality assurance for the ingredients that go in the boxes. So it's, you know, it's like a bunch of different things. So we've built on some of our other ones, but really with a focus on like how does this work for somebody who's purchasing carrots? So literally, the theme is about carrots.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: Thank you, Steve. That's great. And just before I ask you to pass on the baton obviously the length of time that you've been involved in this, we've got one thing behind us, you know, the transformative power. But can you remember a before and after? Like, was it transformational? Was it in the DNA of HelloFresh? And to be honest? Were you always customer-centric? Were you always hungry for this kind of insight and open to this type of technology? Or can you remember a transformation?
Steve Crolic, Associate Director Voice of the Customer, HelloFresh: I think the company was always open to it. It doesn't necessarily mean that we find CX bliss wherever we turn. You know, it's still a challenge. But I think that original core use case around the recipe feedback has meant that the company has always seen value in understanding and using the technology. And I think there is so much value in it. It’s right at our fingertips.
Discovering unseen issues with Abdul Khaled, Eon Next
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: Thank you very much. Abdul, because I think you are very passionate about this; you don't even allow us to speak about it in any other terms than transformative, actually. Again, you've shared some anecdotes in our conversation earlier, but just again, casting your mind back to where is the inflection point where you could say this is beginning to be transformative versus useful.
Luke Moore is joined by Abdul Khaled to discuss the ways Chattermill is helping EON Next discover unknown issues with executive insight reports
Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, CX and Digital Products at Eon Next: I think it's the business being customer experience-led. We've seen every industry has a different context and a different journey. In our industry, we've seen that technology is no longer the differentiator because - as we have friends from Octopus and Kraken over here - I’ll acknowledge that they now own nearly 50% of the UK market (or households) so they're killing it from a technology perspective. That means we can't play that game. So we've got to find something different.
That's where the customer experience layer becomes the USP for us because you have a choice in that scenario. You could go toe-to-toe with a beast. But why would you, if they're doing something great, right? Even we're powered by Kraken, so we have that sort of underlying technology layer.
So customer experience is our transformative power. It helps us to see how we get in front of the customer, how we invest our time and effort, and then leverage third parties and outsourced partners to then power some of the other stuff.
So again, every industry has a different journey and a different context. But in our industry, I think we felt that's where we will make our play. Every business wants to stand for something, and I think we're really coming into our own when it comes to standing for customer experience. I've got a few awards for it, public recognition for it, and I think that then builds the momentum and it's something we can stay and work on.
I don't say this lightly because I'm at a Chattermill event, but, you know, every time I go and do these events I talk about Chattermill quite regularly. Because it's that foundational enabler to then start that transformative journey. You need something that enables you to get there. I think that the fellow panelists have talked about some of the impact.
It's those proof points that then allow you to transform strategy and create momentum within the business. The scores that I mentioned earlier, those are positive scores, you know, whether it's ratings or Trustpilot. That's something you can shout out about and stand for.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: I love that. That's great. I love the industry respect as well. There was a lot of industry respect there, but in a really, really actually powerful way because I'd never thought about it like that, that you must have been a conscious decision as EON Next to say, technology is not going to be our USP.' So, something has to be - you're obviously in an industry where there's obviously a lot of similarity in principle between what you offer - and that was a very conscious strategic decision as an organization.
Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, CX and Digital Products at Eon Next: As sort of head of CX, that was the way. This is the center. This is the way we're going to steer the business now.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: But it's a really powerful statement because I guess you have to be different in some respects and technology is a huge enabler of differentiation and innovation. And obviously, you've adopted some of that technology in between the two of you, and as sort of the giants of the industry. But you made a conscious decision that it would be transformative.
Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, CX and Digital Products at Eon Next: It was. It was stripping back to why we exist and what the core ethos was - it was to be customer-centric, to be customer-first. Otherwise (and we joke about this all the time) we went from EON to EON Next. The whole idea was to be different. Otherwise, you know, you just added another piece of the logo or something onto the logo. You might as well have just stayed EON and saved a lot of money. But that was the conscious decision to be different, to be customer-centric.
These are words that are easy to say and it looks good on a mission statement. But then the reality is, how do you actually make it come alive? And I think this is obviously everything we discussed for the past 45 minutes or so. It is the examples of how you take that vision and then make it a reality.
Shifting from customer feedback to sentiment analysis with Catherine Hanys, Le Shuttle and James McGhee, FootAsylum
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: Yes, you gave an example of the individual customers' voice being presented to the CEO.
And Cat, you kind of used a sort of the VIP customer scenario to say, look at the quantified impact of that versus everything else that's going along. Do you find those conversations are easy to have in your senior leadership role and with other senior leaders in the business? Is it sort of as natural to be customer-centric as a differentiator?
Luke Moore chats to Catherine Hanys of LeShuttle about making customer experience a differentiator in the business
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: Yeah. I mean, within my business, this has been actually a very, a relatively easy thing to kind of encourage people to get on board with. We are helped by the fact that our CEO is relatively new to the business. He's a couple of years in. But he's a French chap. He has aspent most of his career in America. So he's quite tech-forward. We are very customer-centric, but what we focus on, I think, is customer feedback. And what I want to do is move away from feedback to experience.
So not just, you know, as I said before, the barrier doesn't work or whatever, but how does that affect your whole experience? And also, you know, something we can't do - but hopefully an AI tool can - is tell us how that links to different customers. So, you know, we have all these data points. We have feedback from customers at the point at which they book, for example, and one of the things we ask them at the point at which they book is why did you book with us. It could be speed. It could be value for money. It could be whatever, but then once you come back, what's their feedback telling us about those categories? So do we approach them differently depending on the experience they've had versus what they said they wanted from us? And I mean, that's impossible with highlighters and manual work. We need something better to make that happen. You know, you've exhausted.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: You've exhausted the highlighter technology completely. James I might ask you to answer a question on this later - the nuance as you see it between feedback and experience. James, you’ve described your kind of journey into FootAsylum as you're already passionate about this subject area. You came and you sounded like you had fewer people around you to support what you do and you use technology to help that.
What do you make of the point that Cat made about the difference between feedback and experience? Looking at the experience as a joined-up thing, I guess, versus being more reactive? Is that what you meant, Cat? Maybe you could answer back as well.
Luke Moore chats to Catherine Hanys and James McGhee of LeShuttle about the difference between customer feedback and customer experience
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: So it is one thing to kind of analyze different lines of feedback, but it's quite another thing to work out how that actually affects the customer's sort of feeling towards you. For example, will they come back or will they recommend you? Do they think it's a great experience? You know, are they only choosing you because you're the only option?
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: James, how, what's your experience of that definition that Cat just gave?
James McGhee, Director of Customer Experience, FootAsylum: So I was going to say that I would change the word experience for sentiment. I think an easy sell in my business was I can get as many five-star trust pilot reviews as you want. And it might say the contact center really fixed me and it was great, but everything else was awful. And we would miss the awful bit. That was the easy way of selling it in the business.
The other bit is a similar sort of situation in both of my last two roles is that we were the challenger in the market and you have to try and differentiate yourself somehow. I was brought up on the fact that customer experience would be how you differentiated. You know, talk about the Zappos story and the fact that we would be successful because we were up against Curry's and now I'm up against JD Sports and half a percent of their business.
We fundamentally changed our discussion around how we sell that internally. That is to say, if we get things right for our customer and we can make ourselves their destination of choice, you are fundamentally changing your business by getting 0.1 to 0.5% of one of these huge monolith businesses. That's where I've seen the difference.
The rapid growth that we had at AO we've had here. Huge growth at Foot Asylum has come because we care; we sweat that small stuff. We care about that. I've always considered it the place where we'll win. It’s certainly not the product in the industries that that I've worked in. It's certainly not availability. Availability is, you know, even across those industries. It's about how you make those customers feel and how you understand their feelings about it. That will win. So that sentiment piece was the biggest bit rather than trying to build out experiences.
If customers hate carriers because they don't tell you when they're going to be in, how can you influence that journey so that the sentiment changes and pivots to a positive one? I think we've learned a lot more out of those smaller bits than the sort of big parts. I don't assess whether customers like our website or not. We've got a great e-commerce team and the results are in the pound notes. Really they'll be adjusted by that, but I do care if the communication is not clear because that's what will stop me spending again. CX is a huge repeat custom driver. It's almost impossible to quantify but it's basically like proving that gravity works. I would say if you treat customers well, they'll come back.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: So we've gone from feedback to experience and quantifying it is a challenge. But CX is an essential ingredient and you can see the benefits in awareness and word of mouth, growth, and retention. All four of you seem to have a huge amount of passion for it. I guess if one of you is absent in your company, then the examples don't keep getting brought up.
Getting stakeholder buy-in with Steve Crolic, HelloFresh
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: Steve, have you found over the long haul - because it's such a natural part of what HelloFresh do - do you have to maintain a level of passion within the business to focus on this topic? Do you get challenged on the ROI question? Do you ever find yourself in a scenario where you've got strong insight indicating a productive change, but it actually gets challenged maybe because there isn't a tangible ROI? What's been your experience of these things?
Luke Moore chats to Steve Crolic of HelloFresh about how to get stakeholder buy-in for CX
Steve Crolic, Associate Director Voice of the Customer, HelloFresh: So I think it's definitely always a challenge. I think we're lucky in that our executives are investing in the things that our customers are telling us they want through their feedback. That could be more variety in the menus or more specific delivery slots. We’re investing in our own fleet delivery now for the last mile because we know customers have a better experience when we do that. And we make fewer mistakes than the average courier does. So there's all of that stuff.
It can be a challenge when you get into individual topics. It doesn't necessarily all pan out the way you would want it to. So, you do have to work on those principles. I think that the first part is just having a good solid base to operate from. It's understanding your data and which teams you need to work with to make stuff happen.
We're a central team. We work with a lot of the local teams in the individual markets. We see cases where they just take the data and run with it. And we can say that method looks great, keep it up. Let's see if we can teach it to the other markets. So, for example, in Canada, they used some of their retention modeling that we do around customer feedback data to figure out how much they could invest into a physical component to go into our shipment to have much better temperature performance because that's something that matters for the quality of our ingredients right. They can go beyond the hard costs and incorporate some of the retention costs that we associate with certain feedback topics. So that's been really powerful for us.
It doesn't necessarily mean that every topic is the same. I mean there are certain ones that are operational-based where you can go to a stakeholder with a chart where you're already thinking it’s way too specific. It doesn't happen, and then you go back at it the second time. Then you try it from a different angle, and you bring in the retention values and that just doesn't land. So we have to have a good idea of where our opportunities are and which ones we can make progress on. But there always tends to be plenty of opportunities to work on.
Proving ROI with Catherine Hanys, Le Shuttle
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: Coming back to you, Cat. Hearing those ROI stories, obviously, you've been trying to you've been trying to prove the case using highlighters. Where do you think you'll get in terms of trying to find that tangible link to ROI? Do you think it's necessary for that next phase to find those tangible links? Do you already have ideas about you what you already have? And how you want to shape it?
Luke Moore chats to Steve Crolic of HelloFresh about how to get stakeholder buy-in for CX
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: I mean, I don't really use highlights; I should just say that was a bit glib. I think there are two things here, really. First of all, we do really have investment internally in this as a concept without proving a massive ROI. It is something that, at a senior leadership level, is wanted.
In terms of the actual ROI, really the biggest thing for me is that we have three different measurements that we look at each month very carefully. NPS being the first, customer satisfaction, and then the last one is future consideration. Probably as with most businesses, NPS is the most volatile. If they've just had a bad experience, the NPS falls off. Their satisfaction doesn't necessarily fall quite as far. They still might be relatively satisfied with their overall lifetime experience with the shuttle. Their future consideration is the one that is the last to take a hit.
Now, without giving too much away, over the last few years it's been very difficult with Brexit and Covid and our future consideration has really dropped. There are lots of reasons - some are our fault and some aren't - but future consideration has dropped. What we need to do is work out at what point does the low NPS score become a low future consideration score. So at what point are they saying I won't travel with you again? That’s the bit where we can work on ROI. We can stop customers from going away if we can work that out.
Everyone’s thoughts on their future dreams for AI
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: I was going to come back to you then, Abdul, just for a second before we move to the audience for any remaining questions. Just in your wildest dreams, what do you think AI could do for CX in the future? Things that may seem possible, or don't seem possible. It'd be a great way to get everybody's thoughts.
Luke Moore chats to the panel about what they see AI offering CX in the future
Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, CX and Digital Products at Eon Next: I'll keep it somewhat realistic. Because I think AI has already even just within the last six months 12 months has already surpassed a lot of wild dreams for a lot of people. Pre Lyra coming in what we used to do is take the chat among feedback, download it into a CSV file, chuck it into ChatGPTand get a summary. And that was great until my team told me that ChatGPT introduced a limit so we couldn't get more so then we had to pay for it. But that was slightly better than the manual process that you were going through but it's still a very inefficient process.
So the fact that you now have Lyra makes that - Dan I know you've used - it's seconds now right? So efficiencies are number one when it comes to AI because We had people doing that whole process and trying to get the summaries around that. I love the anomaly detection. It's in all my slides anytime I talk about CX because that allows us to get ahead of the game right, that's that proactive-reactive piece, right? Because it allows us to see where the trends are and really get out of the game, right, so that in itself is phenomenal.
If we're now trying to push the boundaries a little bit again, I think you mentioned it with Lyra; I think it was your question as well. Could we talk to Lyra? I think will be a game-changer. It means I don't have to talk to my team I can just ask Chattermill why is this happening and where are the trends. I think that would be phenomenal. So if you take it from an efficiencies perspective, and the insight, and then the intelligence piece - to be able to do that within seconds is key. Good customer experience is speed. If customers have a problem they want it yesterday and not today.
I use other tools and put them into Chattermill and some of those tools are phenomenal as well because they reduce load. I once interviewed someone and I might have to go find him again. He said to me, 'I'm a lazy developer,' and I thought, 'Well I’m not going to hire you.' And then I waited until he’d finished and he said, 'You know, I just want things done for me. I just want automation and efficiencies.' And now in this world of AI, I totally understand. So I'm going to have to go find him again because I want to be lazy. I want that data and I want that information to come to me.
You now have prototyping tools where you're able to chuck a prototype in there and of course, it's not accurate, it's not based on real customer data, but it gives you an indication of where customers are going to drop off or where they're going to engage. Even if you're able to tweak it by five or ten percent and then take it to real customers, you're having a conversation that's at least one step ahead of the conversation that you would have had. So, efficiency is intelligence. I think that's the space that AI can really help.
Luke Moore, CRO at Chattermill: And Steve and Cat, just even briefly, if you want to echo or add anything that you would hope I could deliver for CX that is either already on the cards or something beyond that.
Steve Crolic, Associate Director Voice of the Customer, HelloFresh: So I definitely echo all of that. I think also what I'm looking for is the opportunity to make things more engaging for people who don't have CX metrics as part of their primary or secondary KPIs. I think, you know we traditionally consumed a lot of the Chattermill output in our internal system so we would like re-ingest it and then report on it. Now a lot of the newer features mean that we're pushing a lot more people to use the platform directly because there's a lot of power there that you can do real-time and it’s relatively user-friendly.
So getting that in front of people who are worried about, for example, line production efficiency or something typically that's not the easiest conversation to have can show them CX data. Some of this stuff is now cool enough and real-time enough that I think there's an appetite for other teams who are not traditional users of this feedback to get interested and feel like it's not a big burden and feel like there's you know immediate opportunities in there.
James McGhee, Director of Customer Experience, FootAsylum: I’m not a big tech person; that sounded really Northern. I don't really get these computers. But what I'm excited about is actually the sort of the lower diffusion of innovation if you like - the laggards catching up and it becoming a bit more standard. You're not having to fight when you talk about AI because I’ve got people on our senior team that are like, 'it can do all this and it can change our business.’
You've got others going; I just want a pen and paper. For me, it's the adoption of it and I think with that comes things that would be more convenient for customers. I'm looking at it through a customer lens. I want somebody to be able to use their assistant on their phone to order something from us and it'd be accurate and talk to them like they're a human. Just do something really simple and easy, so I'm not taking 40 minutes out of my day to buy a pair of trainers and the next day worrying whether they're going to turn up. That's my thoughts on it.
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: I guess I'm not really qualified to talk too much about the future. I'm just at the moment trying to get to where where you already are. I think the thing for me is really to to use this all to get to a more holistic view of a customer. You know, as I've mentioned lots of times, the post-travel survey the post-booking survey, that's really all I'm going on about at the moment. But what we want to get to is a point where we're also bringing in social sentiment, Trustpilot, Zendesk customer relations - all of that information - into one place, and use it to get a holistic view of what the customer needs. Rather than just always say the same thing about this. Really, what we find at the moment is what we're looking for, and we need to find other things.
Questions and Answers
We opened the discussion to questions from the audience. Here are those with answers from our panelists.
Everything that we're talking about here is understanding online feedback. How do you listen to offline feedback and bring that into the same level of data that you're getting from online customers?
James McGhee, Director of Customer Experience, FootAsylum: We treat it across the two different channels and we've done a lot of work to encourage our teams to garner that feedback. We’re not perfect at it. That is going to be part of the next six months of our business - to work out how to capture that feedback. We've put a lot of ideas on the table, but fundamentally we want that verbatim feedback so that Chathammill can then help us to analyze it. Because we see the value in that rather than the smiley faces or the feedback from store managers about fabricated customers they might have spoken to and all of that.
We want them to be able to give us their feedback - for there to be a reason to give us their feedback - and that's usually around improving their in-store experience. We want people who didn't buy from us to tell us why they didn't buy from us. All of that's in the survey; they can follow different paths and Chattermill takes all that in.
But it's really about that frontline person caring enough to drive those surveys and we haven't been perfect at it by any stretch. I'm not going to say that it'd be worth spending any time talking about it, but that's our intention. And when that intention becomes reality, we have the tool we need to make real progress, as we've seen from an e-commerce perspective.
Abdul Khaled, Head of Digital, CX and Digital Products at Eon Next: So, building on what James just said, I can give you a more tangible execution that we've done. So as part of this transformation piece, we were trying to bring different parts of the journey together so we see it as one journey. So someone buys in-store, on the phone, online, and then you've got offline, throughout.
So what we've been doing as part of our CX transformation is; bringing in a concept of tribes, which is a fancy word for squads, but tribes is a nice way to describe it. It brings different people from the organization that own different parts of that journey together. So now when we're talking, we've started to introduce service design. This means that we're going beyond just the digital interface and we're looking at end-to-end experience. So getting service designers to design that whole experience end-to-end. The whole conversation they talk about in terms of online, offline, and everything in between - even including the Royal Mail journey - what are the different processes and steps there?
I think that's fundamentally changing the way that we're looking at customer experience because customer experience can very evidently get mistaken for just digital experience. It's looking at all of those touchpoints. There's so much depth we can go into this, but I'm going to refer you to the gentleman at the back there, so Sam and Sean, who is in one of the tribes so he can talk to you a little bit more about how that experience goes. Sam, who actually, looks after the whole CX piece, you know talk to those two gentlemen, I'm sure they can give you more and more details later on.
Steve Crolic, Associate Director Voice of the Customer, HelloFresh: I don't know if this is a great answer, but we do. We have a lot of like captive customers who are our employees. So a large percentage of my colleagues get the HelloFresh delivery on a weekly basis or nearly weekly. So, we have online communities at work and people can say anything from like, 'Why did we send this much chili pepper? This is way too much. No human could send this much chili pepper.' To ‘this instruction and this recipe was a little confusing’. So yeah, it's definitely hard to know what to do from the people you don't hear from but we also have a decent-sized captive audience that we can go back and forth with and get detailed feedback from and it's actually been really helpful.
Catherine Hanys, Head of Customer Insights, LeShuttle: All I would say really is that, from my point of view, we're very lucky that we have an office above the terminal building so we have direct access to our customers, and we do use it. You know, my team will go down and talk to customers, I'll go down and talk to customers; we do especially during busy times, school holidays, maybe have to have all of those things. We go down and talk to customers even if it's just about a small question. So really what I'm going to say is thank you, because I'm just going to add that to the scope now.
