How Mindful Chef Boosted Retention and Customer Lifetime Value Through Feedback Analysis

“Overall, last year, we've taken a more proactive approach to customer feedback, fixing any recurring issues, and we’ve seen complaints go down and our NPS score rise as a result. We’re now hitting our internal targets every week, and we’re seeing a 20% increase in retention. Our Customer Lifetime Value has also increased by 20%.”

Megan Wood

Head of Customer Performance

Increased customer retention by 20%

Boosted customer lifetime value by 20%

40% of growth driven by word-of-mouth referrals

Challenge

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Mindful Chef is a UK-based healthy recipe box service, serving over 45,000 active customers. Since its launch, the company has delivered over 30 million meals, continuously expanding its market share in the industry.

The company experienced significant growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, when more people ordered recipe boxes than ever before. But as the world slowly returned to normal, the team faced a pressing challenge: retaining customers who had increased their orders during that time.

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve faced the challenge of how to protect and improve our customer retention, especially after the peak during COVID when people were ordering recipe boxes more often,” says Megan Wood, Head of Customer Performance at Mindful Chef.

“Coming out of that, we needed to rethink how to maintain that retention. Plus, we were seeing higher churn, and the challenge was that we didn’t fully understand some of the reasons behind it or only realized the issues after customers had already left,” she adds.

Yet understanding how to prevent churn required deeper insights into customer feedback on a more granular, ongoing basis. The company realized it couldn’t rely on annual surveys to guide its decisions anymore. It needed to track how customer sentiment changes over time and identify issues as they occur.

“We realized that we needed to focus on understanding the weekly changes in customer feedback and what drives those shifts, instead of relying on big one-off surveys. We had a lot of questions, but we knew that NPS would be the key metric. Our goal was to identify what the things that improved NPS were, and how can we continually improve them. What were the things that detracted from NPS, and how can we fix them? And how was NPS related to growth?” says Megan.

The team also needed to get answers faster to address issues quickly and efficiently. Some issues - whether related to ingredients, packaging, or recipe feedback - went unnoticed until it was too late.

Ultimately, the team realized they needed a solution that would provide near real-time insights and make it easily accessible to everyone in the organization. The goal was to empower all teams, not just analysts, to explore the data themselves and act on it quickly.

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Solution

To enhance retention, Mindful Chef needed a way to respond more quickly and accurately to customer feedback. Chattermill provided the tools to align the entire business around its strategic goals, ensuring that retention became a key focus across teams.

“One of our biggest challenges has been getting everyone on board with the importance of retention. While retention is critical for every team, not everyone initially saw it that way. By making NPS a key weekly metric, we've brought it into our team discussions, helping everyone understand how their individual efforts contribute to retention and the overall customer experience. This alignment has played a crucial role in driving our success,” says Megan.

So far, Mindful Chef has built a variety of Chattermill dashboards that enable them to effectively monitor NPS across different customer segments. These dashboards allow the entire business to stay aligned and make informed decisions together.

“We like to keep a close eye on the data in real-time. Every Wednesday, during our big company meeting, we show a slide with our NPS score. We track it in a dashboard, so we can quickly see if it's been a good or bad week based on what customers are loving or not loving. It helps us understand sentiment across areas like menu variety or recipe preferences,” Megan explained.

This enables the team to pinpoint which aspects of the customer experience need attention - whether it’s recipes, delivery, or other areas - and take immediate action.

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Improving family portion sizes based on customer feedback

With access to customer insights, Mindful Chef can dive deeper into specific customer segments and tailor their approach accordingly.

For example, when feedback indicated that families were dissatisfied with portion sizes, they investigated further and found that larger households were struggling with inadequate servings.

“We noticed that families were rating portion sizes lower than smaller households. After digging into the comments, we found complaints about ingredients like chicken thighs and rice not being enough,” said Megan.

In response, they increased the portion sizes for families, adding more chicken thighs and rice to each order. This adjustment led to a 50% improvement in sentiment for the family segment, with positive sentiment jumping from 38 to 57.

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Enhancing the recipe instructions

Another area Mindful Chef focused on was the clarity of the cooking instructions provided in their recipe magazine.

Feedback showed that cooking times and preparation instructions weren’t always clear, especially for customers who needed guidance on specific ingredients or equipment.

“Before Chattermill, we didn’t have a way to collect feedback on instructions referring to timing or which pots and pans to use. This was a great example of how using NPS data led to cross-team collaboration. The operations team, tech team, and creative team all worked together on it, and we were able to quickly make changes based on real customer feedback,” said Megan.

By acting on this feedback, Mindful Chef revamped their recipe magazine layout to improve clarity. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with 90% of survey respondents saying the new layout was much better.

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A unified approach to retention

Perhaps one of the most important outcomes has been the shift in how the entire company now views retention. By making NPS a central metric, Mindful Chef has ensured that retention is prioritized across all teams.

This alignment across departments has fostered a culture of continuous improvement, with each team focused on enhancing customer satisfaction and retention.

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Results

Within the last few years, Mindful Chef has seen impressive improvements in both customer satisfaction and retention. By being able to monitor customer feedback and address issues proactively, the company has significantly boosted its performance in several key areas.

“Overall, last year, we've taken a more proactive approach to fixing any recurring issues, and we’ve seen complaints go down and our NPS score rise as a result,” said Megan.

Their NPS score improved by 20% over the course of the year, a direct result of the team's newfound ability to address emerging issues quickly.

This boost in NPS was accompanied by a 20% increase in 12-month retention and customer lifetime value (CLV). Mindful Chef has consistently hit its internal targets each week, and retention rates continue to grow in the short and long term.

“We’re now hitting our internal targets for those every week, and we’re seeing a 20% increase in retention. Our Customer Lifetime Value has also increased by 20%,” Megan shared.

“We’ve also managed to promote more customers from lower segments into top-tier segments like platinum and gold. This has improved by 30% year on year,” she adds.

Overall, Mindful Chef's focus on retention and loyalty has fostered strong brand advocacy among their top customers.

“About 40% of the customers we acquire come from some form of referral, not necessarily through a formal referral scheme, but just word of mouth. Our top customers really become brand advocates and are incredibly close to the business in a community sense, which is really great to see,” says Megan.