How musicMagpie Navigated Seasonal Challenges by Harnessing the Power of Customer Insights

"We benefited from Chattermill significantly, but most importantly, we gave our customers a louder voice. Today, whenever we receive any written communication from a customer, my first thought is always - how do we get that into Chattermill?”

Jonathan Beirne

Chief Customer Officer

200+ hours of manual work saved

3 teams leveraging Chattermill to make informed decisions

70k customer contacts analysed within Chattermill AI each month

Challenge

With the rise of the circular economy, musicMagpie is known as the #1 platform for buying and selling refurbished tech and physical media products in the UK.

With over nine million users and counting, the company considers customer experience the key component of its business strategy. musicMagpie Chief Customer Officer, Jonathan Beirne, oversees the company’s relationship with its customers and, together with the team, drives efforts to elevate experiences at each stage of the customer journey.

“It’s massively important to give a customer a voice in our business. They’re constantly telling us about their needs, preferences, and frustrations, so if we want to retain them and attract new customers, we must always listen to their feedback and act on it,” said Beirne.

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Why musicMagpie Chose Chattermill

It can be overwhelming when a high-volume transaction business receives over 70,000 customer contacts each month. The company relied on the Customer Support team to manually tag conversations for further analysis.

“Chattermill has allowed us to be more effective and scalable. We no longer have to manually tag conversations, which has freed up a lot of time in our team. It’s also allowed us to analyse in more depth what the customer conversations are about – giving us further context on the issue. Now we can pinpoint at which exact place in the customer journey the issues are arising and sort them more efficiently,” says Jonathan Beirne, Chief Customer Officer.

Jonathan wanted to be able to analyse customer feedback on a deeper level but also take the strain away from his team and free their time from admin tasks so they could truly focus on the customers.

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Customer Experience Improvements with Chattermill

It all started with unifying their customer feedback across different sources and touchpoints: from Livechat conversations through support tickets, online reviews, customer surveys, and even feedback widgets on their website.

“By bringing all that data together, we can see clearly where issues and pain points are happening in the customer journey. Sometimes when we look at our dashboard in Chattermill, we can see it in seconds,” says Beirne.

The team started to analyse the sentiment distribution, or the positivity index, across automatically assigned themes, categories, and phrases. Manual tagging was replaced with intelligent theme structure and complicated analysis with AI-based insights.

“We quickly realised that using AI for sentiment analysis provides more accuracy, but most importantly, it’s consistent, gives us more context, and eliminates human bias. It’s the same logic day in and day out that we can rely on,” says Beirne.

These AI-based insights helped answer critical questions and improve many aspects of the business at some level: from product quality to packaging and pricing. Most importantly, Chattermill became an essential platform, especially during the peak seasons, when retailers braced for logistical and customer service challenges.

In addition, Jonathan and his team set up Anomaly Alerts to be proactively notified of any important events or incidents which deviate from regular patterns. Chattermill uses historical benchmarks to detect anomalies in their data and identify critical issues with delivery, payments, or product quality, so now the team can easily spot the warning signs before it’s too late.

"During the peak shopping season, we leveraged Chattermill to analyse issues with deliveries and we were able to use that data to optimize our logistics. This allowed us to have an optimal season delivery period, and our customer feedback helped us navigate through it and improve.”

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The Results

By leveraging Chattermill, Jonathan and his team saved over 200 hours each month that would otherwise be spent on manual analysis. Today, the team receives actionable AI-based insights based on 70,000 customer contacts each month.

The improvements they’ve made directly impacted the contact volume, sentiment, and, most importantly, customer satisfaction. Together, the team is now able to listen to the voice of over 9 million musicMagpie customers.

“We benefited from Chattermill significantly, but most importantly, we gave our customers a louder voice. We can now feed more insights back to other areas of the business and set up priorities based on them. Today, whenever we receive any written communication from a customer, my first thought is always -how do we get that into Chattermill?”

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