Unlocking the voice of the customer
Do you listen to your customers enough? We thought we did. Find out how we made a change which now allows the Waitrose digital team to react swiftly and accurately to customer feedback
The John Lewis Partnership is built on the backbone of listening to its partners (employees) as part of any business process as co-owners. But what about our customer and making that listening visible and accountable to all?
We all know customers are at the heart of every business, but how can you respond to their concerns quickly enough in the digital age where face to face feedback is not an option?
As a supermarket with a reputation for exceptional customer experience, Waitrose needs its digital experience to be as seamless as possible. And when customers do get frustrated we needed to know why and respond quickly. Back in 2019 this was not the case.
So what was the problem
Feedback is delivered from various channels depending on the project needs but our most regular day to day form of contact comes from our regular NPS and customer experience surveys run on both our website and app platforms. The delivery however was fractured and less than agile. As with any UX challenge we started by speaking with our teams across design and development to see how they used feedback and any pain points. We identified the following issues with the process…
- We only received feedback reports every week on a Monday morning as a spreadsheet, which for the most part awareness was reliant on your email being included on the mailing list.
- Carving out a regular slot of time to review the spreadsheet each week was significant (further exacerbated with fully remote working over covid).
- Giving access to or setting up partner mindsets to check feedback regularly was difficult or in some cases impossible for external contractors.
- Looking back at feedback from the past or analysing themes over time meant manually sifting, copying & managing a master spreadsheet by many team members.
- It wasn’t accessible in day to day tooling that every member of Waitrose digital uses and as such could be forgotten about by some circles.
How did we develop a solution
How might we better increase visibility, accessibility and speed of customer feedback to empower teams to own the voice of the customer and act upon it.
After speaking with our end consumers of the data we had a fairly established how might we statement to ideate with. From this point on we collaborated with our amazing partners in platform, insights & PO to work with our third party survey platform on how best to progress with a solution.
When assessing what was important to us we focussed on the following areas
- There shouldn’t be any additional work each week to make this work. Being automated, robust and compliment the traditional spreadsheet
- It should be accessible in the widest possible format and software across the business and more importantly the Digital Team.
- It should allow flexibility for how our users want to work and create better communication
- Most importantly it should make using and acting on customer feedback enjoyable and useful 🎉
After accessing what was available in our software stack and referencing our needs we eventually whittled it down to Slack being our best case for a prototype and test. Offering us the following.
🧑💻 The tool teams generally have open all day long.
👥 Accessible to anyone in our workspace without needing to maintain access lists whilst still remaining secure.
✏️ Extensible via apps and workflow extensions
💬 Could foster communication, sharing to our team channels and open forum discussion.
🔍 Powerful built in search and tagging functionality
We worked fairly rapidly from this point on iterating over a few technical possibilities with our supplier (from custom webhook methods and scheduled jobs) before settling on an automated solution that offered us near realtime feedback direct into slack channels just a few minutes after feedback was left.
How it’s been received
Since we first trialled the solution with various teams we have grown to 4 continuous feedback channels being regularly assessed. Dividing these into both positive and negative comments from our web and app shopping solutions.
We’ve seen a really positive engagement rate since integrating with this solution and adding it to workflows. With teams across experience design & product management discussing customer feedback, and was essential in some of our discussions and solutions during COVID-19. Teams are now using this solution daily to help improve customer experiences and their own time and roles at work
- Design teams are more regularly pulling feedback on features and functions both during discovery stages and in continuous improvement sessions.
- Product Managers review feedback against releases to help measure success and include customer quotes in sprint reviews.
- Quality Assurance and Dev teams use the feedback to identify and solve live issues on our platforms and for further evidence to support longer term fix projects.
but don’t take my word for it here is what some of our team think about this
‘It’s a key part of my role to understand customer insight and work out how it might influence my roadmap. It’s vital in helping me ask the right questions to effectively inform the next decisions we make. I am always scanning the slack channel to pick up threads or trends that I just would never get to otherwise. We recently released a new feature and the whole development team was engaged as we were immediately able to identify where the customer pain points were and develop quick solutions to overcome these challenges.’ Ollie Killinger, PM
‘Since having the ability to access customer feedback in Slack, this has enabled all members of our Digital team to gain insight into the problems our customers are facing. This has intrigued and empowered team members into starting conversations about how we might go about solving these problems which was not happening nearly as much before this was introduced.’ Margaux Barron, PM
Learnings, Iterations & management
We’ve learnt a lot over the last two years about how our team members want to use the tool and what was missing in the first release and how to make it easier to manage & in true product design style we’ve enhanced and developed the solution following feedback.
A taste of some of the improvements we’ve worked on are…
💻 Adding the device types and user agent strings to each piece of feedback to support technical investigations & identify feature requests on platforms.
🆔 Our identity work stream added a workflow integration to request further identifiable information on a specific users feedback to check logs.
📱 Our mobile app team worked on splitting our feedback into improvement and enjoyment following success in categorisation on web.
🐦 Added further support for all tagged mentions of Waitrose on Twitter to be fed into slack to add a further voice of the customer source to our repertoire
The biggest learning that we have added to the solution is related to longer term management of feedback and making it easy for teams to maintain archives or keep track of their area. We found members naturally started tagging posts with emoji’s that made sense such as 🔍(search) 🥫(product details page) 🎰(slots) 🚤(speed) 👀(competitors) and since adopted it as a standard within the work practise.
Abigail Rumsey one of our UX researchers further iterated on this by using an extensible slack app Reacji Channeller. We were then able to maintain a solution whereas anyone in slack can tag feedback with a specific emoji and it will be automatically fed into a custom channel setup just for that topic.
Since setting this up we’ve seen teams adopting custom designed emoji’s in slack for better granularity and control and we’ve seen great success across teams when using this solution for tracking big propositional changes or time of year events such as Christmas Slots releases where multiple sources (social, app and web) may need to be monitored or reviewed in one location.
Our Takeaway
Within Waitrose we’ve found a way to deliver complex customer feedback channels into a solution that fits for most needs of our users and drive better workflows because of it. We’re still learning and adapting to our needs like any good product solution does but our key takeaway is that listening to the voice of the customer is essential to all aspects of business and product development however you manage it.
This isn’t something that needs to be restricted to researchers or designers. In our case we’ve found it useful to fully democratise the availability and use of customer feedback as a powerful means to empower our partners to make better decisions, fix problems at speed and remember that at the end of the day you have no product without anyone to use it.
How do you manage voice of the customer in your business or work let us know in the responses and read more stories from the team at Waitrose digital in our publication
