How Chattermill helps HelloFresh use Customer Feedback to Drive Innovation & Retention

Challenge

With years of revenue growth and product expansion, HelloFresh has a strong focus on retaining existing customers and applying a customer-centric mindset across new markets. To enhance this customer-centric culture, the company needed to first understand the experience across the entire customer journey, find areas for improvement and innovation, and take action on the voice of the customer.

HelloFresh chose Chattermill’s platform to measure the sentiment behind customer feedback, understand the impact of customer experience on revenue and retention, and empower internal teams with strategic guidance for innovation.

Understanding Customer Sentiment in Any Business Area

With Chattermill, every department at HelloFresh can find answers to almost any business question. Culinary Teams fine-tune cooking instructions to reduce complexity and enhance enjoyment. Operational Teams optimize the supply chain by tracking insights about ingredient quality and suppliers. Product Teams make it easier for users to create accounts or apply discount codes by understanding pain points in the mobile app and on the website.

Turning Customer Feedback Into Innovation

Throughout their years using Chattermill, HelloFresh has gleaned valuable insights about customer preferences and needs to drive innovation. One such innovation is HelloFresh’s recyclable insulation pouch, used to ship ice and proteins to destinations and to keep ingredients fresh.

"We noticed that in some markets like Germany, customer feedback and sentiment were strongly related to the sustainability of our packaging. Our team in Germany created a project team to look at the issue, set up goals, and discussed the impact of recyclable versus non-recyclable packaging on food safety and quality. As a result, they developed a fully recyclable insulation pouch that protects ingredient quality and substantially reduces the amount of plastic materials required for each shipment. Customers who received the new insulation pouch had 33% fewer cancellations related to our packaging."

Another innovation was introduced in the Benelux region: HelloFresh started electrifying the last-mile delivery fleet. Optimizing this process reduced the number of kilometres driven each week by 15%.

Using Chattermill to Drive Retention

Apart from providing strategic guidance for innovation, Chattermill plays a substantial role in how HelloFresh analyzes, understands, and improves customer retention. Using a data-driven approach, HelloFresh discovered a clear link between NPS score, sentiment, and retention, and determined that each NPS point is worth a specific amount in revenue.

"The way we combine Chattermill insights with our sales data allows us to easily link NPS responses to our customer base and tie feedback to retention metrics. When we look at aggregated response data, it’s evident that higher scores and higher retention go hand-in-hand, so understanding these CX score drivers is imperative," says Steve Crolic.

"Chattermill’s platform has transformed our focus on customers’ needs. We can measure the impact of customers complaining about packaging, quality of ingredients, or recipe instructions on retention and revenue. Our estimates prove that if customers think our recipe instructions could have been simpler, that costs us a specific amount of lost revenue and impacts our customer lifecycle value."

Results

HelloFresh’s relentless focus on customer experience and operational excellence has been instrumental in their revenue growth. Over the last year in the US, average order value increased by 30% and average orders per customer grew by 4%. Globally, revenue has multiplied by 5 times over the last five years.