How Tokopedia Mastered the Customer DNA — A Customer-Centric Culture Powered by Technology
Tokopedia was ranked #1 for Best In Customer Service in 2019 by ContactCenterWorld — The Global Association for Contact Center and Customer Engagement Best Practices. This competition and the award is globally regarded as the best in industry and recognizes companies for exceptional work in customer experience, employee engagement, business strategies, contact center, and tech innovation etc.
Around 1600 entrants from 50 nations compete across various categories. Tokopedia was recognized for best in customer service, self-service technology, and technology innovation. These awards put us in the leagues of customer first organizations at the international level. But, we didn’t stop at that, in 2018 Tokopedia launched a customer DNA program which at its core is an initiative to build a customer centric culture powered by innovative use of technology.
When the global economy is reeling under pressure from COVID-19 and the resulting downward pressure, Tokopedia emerged as a leader in various e-commerce categories and our retail business saw a significant surge. With increase in business, the customer experience team is also under a stretch and dealing on multiple fronts:
- A sudden spike in some specific categories, some categories even jumped by three times transaction growth;
- Demand and supply gap (with halted manufacturing, vendors were unable to deliver); and
- Delivery issues and delays resulted by lockdown situations.
Nevertheless, our CX team still managed to live up to our customer expectations and it is evident from positive customer sentiments and trends as reported by the our conversational and social media analytics team which uses a proprietary technology developed by Tokopedia.
Tokopedia attributes this success to our customer DNA and customer first strategies. To deep dive into the company’s ground breaking CX success, CX Thought leaders from Surveysensum interviewed our CX-Insights & Analytics Senior Lead Raihan Al Fauzan as part of the CX team which pioneered Tokopedia’s tech innovation, Customer DNA programs, and other initiatives.
In this candid conversation, Raihan shared some insights into Tokopedia’s Customer DNA program, tech innovations, and other initiatives.
Read till the end and you will have a ready-to-implement CX blueprint for your company.
Q. What was the tipping point for the customer experience program in Tokopedia?
Raihan: We started the customer experience program in 2018 with the objective to know more about our customers. Though we had a customer support team which promptly addressed customer support related issues. The aim of the program was to establish a direct channel between company and the customer and give a voice to the customer in our overall strategy. For us at Tokopedia, CX is not just an initiative but it’s part of the company culture. We call the program as Customer DNA and rightly so because all the features, initiatives are directly aligned with the customer needs.
Q. What was the core objective of starting a CX program? Were there some pain points which needed to be fixed urgently?
Raihan: With more than 90 million active users, we could no longer afford to stay in a reactive mode. There was a need to proactively analyze and categorize the customer feedback across channels to identify themes and issues which were affecting a large set of customers. We started categorizing and assigning issues to specific teams. For example, if there were similar issues reported in shipment, maybe the logistics team needs to revisit the shipment process. If the customer has a problem in ordering something, is there something the product team should fix? If there were issues related to promo codes, coupons, it’s possible that the marketing team needs to redo the process.
To shed some light on the technology behind this initiative, most categorizing and tagging technology is proprietary. We used an external survey tool while the social media sentiment analysis is done by utilizing our Customer Engagement Hub.
Q. How did you initiate? Did you pick up any vendor to implement CX? What was your initial research process?
Raihan: To begin with, we created the CX program internally. There are no external agencies or vendors involved in the process of collecting, compiling, or analyzing the voice of customers. We used survey tools and utilizing the platform to take care of feedback data collection.
The survey tool was selected based on a thorough analysis. We specifically looked for its ability to integrate with our CRM tool and the features that can complement our feedback research process. Currently, we’re planning to develop our internal survey tool as we prove to hear more from the users. It enables us to customize the tool to our specific use cases and could also be managed in a better fashion.
Q. What were the metrics you decided that you need to measure for CX? Example, NPS, CES, CSAT, SLA, Resolution time, Number of complaints?
Raihan: We relied on universally accepted metrics like CES and CSAT to measure our CX effectiveness. We took a different approach for NPS, though. Rather than having an organization level NPS, we have a product level NPS.
Further, we measure the complaint ratio which is arrived at by dividing the total number of complaints with the total number of transactions. This enabled Tokopedia to determine the actual level of CX even as the number of transactions increased substantially. Otherwise, a large number of transactions could be deciphered as a bad sign.
One thumb rule is that the complaint rate should grow consistently or ideally at a lesser rate than the number of transactions. That is one way to measure the overall success of a CX program. In one line, NPS and complaint rate is what we look at to measure the success of the CX program.
Q. Do you link NPS with any metrics, that if NPS increases revenue increases or any other metric like churn/retention?
Raihan: We are moving in that direction. As you know, it’s really tough for any company to link NPS directly with the revenue, though we can feel the impact but it’s hard to pinpoint a growth. When it comes to churn, we are able to find the reason in most cases. We are also working in that direction where we can find a connection between churn and low NPS with a significant confidence.
Q. How do you follow up with your customers (Promoters, Detractors, and Passives)?
Raihan: We prefer to set up a telephonic conversation with the detractor, this helps us build a one-on-one repo with them and also pinpoint the pain areas. The insights we generate from this initiative is remarkable and contributes to a significant improvement in product, market, sales, and customer experience areas.
When it comes to promoters, we take conscious effort in encouraging them to share their voices and experiences through social media channels.
Q. As a B2C company, you have a lot of customers and you might be getting a huge amount of feedback, how do you identify themes and set up next action plans? Is there a monthly meeting that happens with different teams like Product, Service, Marketing, and there these insights are shared?
Raihan: We analyze the gap in customer experience metrics between two specific periods. We prepare a roadmap based on customer feedback and the competitive data. We set the priority based on the roadmap.
We have weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly forums for product, business, customer service, and technical team feedback.
We have a unique initiative called Make It Better forum. We invite our real users to interact with the business, product, and technical teams in one place. These customers are chosen from the detractors and passive users, we analyze the issue that is reported based on the severity of the problem, we will call them and invite them to the forum. The customer will list down the pain points they have while dealing with Tokopedia. The customers are more than happy to directly share their thoughts with Tokopedia’s team.
Q. How do you prioritize solutions because feedback gives you 20 new things but you have to pick what to prioritize?
Raihan: Beside the alignment with the roadmap, the solutions are prioritized based on the volume and severity of the customer asks. One of our DNAs is ‘Focus on Consumer’, and we do that by listening to our customers and gathering their feedback. It gives a pulse of what problems are facing that the brand was not aware of. The feedback was then compiled and classified into segments and handed over to specific departments in charge of it.
However, it must be noticed that managing customer experience is not a single department’s responsibility. It is an organization-wide responsibility. It is an orchestration of multiple functions with diverse digital and physical touch-points. A proper CX plan brings them all together and manages to deliver superior customer experience.
